Sacred Modernity

Nature, Environment and the Postcolonial Geographies of Sri Lankan Nationhood

Tariq Jazeel

Tariq Jazeel

Distributed for Liverpool University Press

200 pages | 6 x 9
Cloth $120.00 ISBN: 9781846318863 Published September 2013 For sale in North America only
Sacred Modernity tours the natural places of Sri Lanka in order to examine the relationship between nature and religion that some Sinhalese Buddhists have developed there. Working through case studies of Sri Lanka’s most prominent national park, Ruhuna, and its post-1950s modernist architecture—known as tropical modernism—Tariq Jazeel reveals the ways Sinhalese Buddhists have interwoven their negotiation of nature with their continued production of a post-colonial identity. He shows how this production minoritizes Tamil, Muslim, and Christian non-Sinhala in the nation’s natural, environmental, and historical order. A sophisticated study of the complexities that lie between nature and culture, Sacred Modernity also demonstrates a social science that works beyond Eurocentric conceptions, offering new contexts for postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and geography.
Contents

List of Maps and Figures

Acknowledgements

 

Introduction

 

1 Sacred Modernity: Nature, Religion, and the Politics of Aesthetics

 

Part I: Ruhuna (Yala) National Park
2 Landscape, Nature, Nationhood: A Historical Geography of Ruhuna (Yala) National Park

3 Inscription and Experience: The Politics and Aesthetics of Nature Tourism

4 Political Geographies: Promoting, Contesting, and Purifying Nature

 

Part II: Tropical Modern Architecture

5 Built Space, Environment, Modernism: (Re)reading ‘Tropical Modern’ Architecture

6 Architecting One-ness: Fluid Spaces/Sacred Modernity

7 Over-determinations: Architecture, Text, Politics

 

Conclusion: Sri Lankan Nature as Problem Space

 

Bibliography

Index

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