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
Liverpool Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs, and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
