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Accepted Paper:

Building Distributions of the Sensible: Architecture, Modernism and the Politics of Sri Lankan Nationhood  
Tariq Jazeel (University College London)

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the connections between modernist architectural productions of space in post-independent Sri Lanka and the ethnicization of everyday life in the context of the country’s civil conflict and postcolonial politics of nationhood.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the connections between modernist architectural productions of space in post-independent Sri Lanka and the ethnicization of everyday life in the context of the country's civil conflict and postcolonial politics of nationhood. The paper explores the recuperation of an avowedly 'vernacular' architectural aesthetics by Sri Lankan 'tropical modern' architects, suggesting how these recuperations and deployments have produced spatialities and modernisms that have (often unwittingly) lent themselves to the reification of Sinhala Buddhist hegemony in the post-colony. In this sense the paper delineates the connections between aesthetics, the production of meaningful space, and ethnicizing forms of hegemony. Though Sri Lankan tropical modern architecture is often explicitly secular and apolitical in its design intentions - professing itself to comprise 'art for art's sake' - the paper traces the ways that it gets subsumed into a broader aesthetic domain that helps to instantiate an ethno-national, non-secular politics of Sri Lankan nationhood.

Panel P34
Aesthetics, politics, conflict
  Session 1