Landscape, Nature, Nationhood: A Historical Geography of Ruhuna (Yala) National Park
Landscape, Nature, Nationhood: A Historical Geography of Ruhuna (Yala) National Park
This first chapter of Part I (on ‘Ruhuna (Yala) National Park’) introduces Sri Lanka's most famous national park, Ruhuna. Drawing on landscape theory drawn from cultural geography, art history and environmental history, as well as archival research it discusses Ruhuna National Park's colonial and contemporary spatial formations. By doing so, the chapter's main argument is that the park's materialities and its discursive and affective resonances are the hybrid result of late colonial desires to enclose and civilize regressive nature on the one hand, and on the other, post-independent desires to reposition Ruhuna as a sacred, anti-colonial Sinhala landscape. The chapter elucidates on the colonial and anti-colonial modernities and rationalities that have framed the park as a quintessential space of Sri Lankan nationhood.
Keywords: Landscape, national parks, Ruhuna, Yala, colonialism, hunting, forestry, nationhood
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