Anoma Pieris

Indigenous Place-Making in the City: Dispossessions, Occupations and Implications for Cultural Architecture

This paper considers Indigenous place-making practices in light of an idea for a major Victorian Indigenous Cultural Knowledge and Education Centre in central Melbourne as championed by Traditional Owners in Victoria. With only eight Aboriginal architects in the country, collaboration with non-Indigenous architects will be inevitable. Two case studies from the recent past—the Tent Embassy in Canberra and a street corner in Collingwood—reveal that dominant cultures of place-making continue to marginalise Aboriginal people in urban Australia. This paper will contend that delivering spatial justice will require both an opportunity for Indigenous Victorians to build visibility in the centre of the city and a willingness within the dominant culture to be deterritorialised.

Occupying the centre: Indigenous presence in the Australian capital city

Abstract This article discusses Indigenous spatial and political presence within Australias capital city in relation to emergent discourses in urban geography on ‘the right to the city’ and theories of assemblage, where history, politics and space are deterritorialized and reterritorialized by marginal communities. In the absence of a comprehensive record on Canberras Aboriginal communities and the significance of contemporary political occupations of the city by civil rights activists this article offers a spatio-temporal record of its history as various strategies for occupying the centre. It discusses several sites of socio-political significance including those related to precolonial and postcolonial history, including the Tent Embassy, Reconciliation Place, AIATSIS and the Gallery of First Australians within the National Museum of Australia.

Southern invasions: post-war tourism in Sri Lanka

The resumption of civilian mobilities after the Sri Lankan civil war (1983–2009) produced new forms of travel, distinct from the military manoeuvres and refugee displacements of the past. Amongst other visitors, impoverished Tamil residents in the Northern Province encountered elderly Sinhala villagers, recommencing a tradition of pilgrimage from the south. The pilgrims’ expanded itineraries, to northern Buddhist sites, combined battlefield and leisure tourism practices, signs of their relative economic advantage. This article studies the socio-spatial impact of this majority–minority encounter, focusing on tourism practices around sites of ‘dissonant heritage’. Methods used include participant observation and informal interviews during four journeys (by air, road, and rail) between 2010 and 2014. It also draws on news reportage and social media. An additional concern of this article is the persistence of wartime hostilities within emergent post-war ‘dark tourism’ practices, which in the case of Sri Lanka have provoked conflicts over heritage. The racialized colonial legacy of tourism, associated politics of subjection, and perpetuation of global social inequities shape polemical postcolonial praxis. Unlike the scenarios associated with the production, interpretation, representation, or consumption of dark travel (related to natural disasters or atrocities) or thanatourism (death or grief tourism) sites, we explore the complexities of a dissonant (contested) heritage. Here, external travel cultures and socio-political agendas intrude on environments of radical human displacement, and competing loyalties, ideologies, and hostilities are invoked. This case study presents a challenge to the largely individualistic, secular and modern consumptive practices, presumed in dark tourism literature, that are superseded by culturally differentiated and politically cultivated ideological beliefs. In Sri Lanka, traditional religious pilgrimages reinforce a communal Buddhist worldview, claiming the national geography as a host to Buddhism, while individualized narratives of commemoration at war memorials defensively assert Sinhala-Buddhist politics. Leisure tourism to the north observes minority culture at the nation’s margins. The uncertainty of those who left this embattled region haunt the certainty of post-war border-crossings, reconstituting post-war tourism as an invasive, colonizing practice from below. This practice is further contextualized within the goals of national development, of political sovereignty and market reintegration, with government and military as agents of change. Sri Lanka has been studied extensively in terms of human displacement and postdisaster reconstruction related to the war and the 2004 tsunami. Conflicts have arisen regarding humanitarian responses, marketization and state patronage of resettlement linked to social reintegration strategies. They are rooted in a contest Postcolonial Studies, 2014, Vol. 17, No. 3, 266–285

Modernism at the Margins of the Vernacular: Considering Valentine Gunasekara

In the final two decades of the twentieth century a variety of Asian architectural publications both referenced and produced a discourse on regionalism that featured a revival of traditional and climatically defined architectural solutions. Robert Powell, Tan Hock Beng, and William Lim were among several authors who published on topics such as the Asian tropical house, tropical resorts, the modern Asian house and the contemporary vernacular, coffee table publications invoking regionalist values. 1 The recurrent use of the terms modern, Asian, and tropical was common, as was reference to regional vernacular architecture. Yet the work that was featured was contemporary: houses or resort hotels designed by local or expatriate architects trained in the Western modernist tradition. Many of these publications borrowed theoretical arguments from an earlier discussion on “Critical Regionalism,” described as an architecture resistant to the universalizing force of the International Style. 2 Kenneth Frampton, Alexander Tzonis, Liane Lefaivre, and others had suggested that architectures derived indirectly from regional sources and from the peculiarities of a particular place could mediate the impact of universal civilization. 3 The use of the term critical by Frampton recalled the “critical theory” of the Frankfurt School and their Marxist critique of the commodification of culture under capitalism. 4 Frampton’s argument famously reconceptualized modernism against contemporary postmodern culture by proposing an architecture in which site, climate, and local technologies (as opposed to history, culture, and identity) constituted regional character. He described this new arriere-guard position as “Contextual Modernism,” a critical practice “which distances itself equally from the Enlightenment myth of progress and from a reactionary, unrealistic impulse to return to the architectonic forms of the pre-industrial past.” 5 This critical reworking of the regionalist position was lost in its translation to sites outside Europe where strategies of resistance were interpreted quite differently from those identified by Frampton. This was particularly true in South and Southeast

Architecture and climate

claims that the film is a digital dystopia which is not unlike the arguments over the film’s ideological message. In addition, the film’s technological achievement constitutes yet another layer in the problem of reading the film. Basu Thakur further states that the emergence of digital technology (the CGI images used by Cameron and celebrated by critics) itself bears the mark of ‘the Western imperial project’. For him, digital images are problematic if they subordinate existing, older images to the digital regime and transform reality into a malleable whole unconstrained by historicity. Basu Thakur ends his book with two most telling examples from the land of the ‘óther’‘Sishu’, a short story by Mahasweta Devi, a Bengali writer of considerable repute. Incidentally, Mahasweta Devi’s short story, ‘Draupadi’ has also been úsed by Spivak while deconstructing Postcolonial Theory. The other example he uses is that of Michael Haneke’s film, Cache (The Intimate Enemy) which was released in 2005. Basu Thakur argues that both films differ from Avatar because they violently disrupt the production of meaning, subjectivity and audience satisfaction. For Basu Thakur, both these texts are truly postcolonial in their content since they discuss such issues as race, multiculturalism, hegemony and representational politics which include attention to otherness otherwise unregistered in mainstream films and literary criticism. These texts also help illustrate, challenge and negotiate the history of Colonialism and its diverse outcomes. Instead of simply being a critique of Colonialism, the book draws us into a discussion of neo-colonialism, issues of representation, subject formation and subalternity. Adopting a fresh perspective as well as inviting a sharp critical stance, the book is a pleasurable and excellent read.

Plural politics and transient labour: reflections on the Sunday map

How does the temporal passage of transient populations through established immigrant geographies inform our definition of diaspora? What implications do they have for a plural political model? This paper studies the interactions and tensions between citizens and transient workers in contemporary Singapore through the analysis of their primary space of congregation, Serangoon Road, ‘Little India’, during Sundays, their off-day. It studies the anxieties regarding otherness and citizenship provoked by their presence in established ethnic communities and their own education into urban citizenship through the camaraderie of the Sunday map, our record of their temporal gathering in the spaces of the Indian district. This paper examines how Indian diasporic identities in the city-state are complicated by the passage of transient workers.1

Between the home and the world in violent conflict

Throughout Sri Lankas civil war (1983–2009) official and international news media was dominated by ethnic politics while civilian voices remained silent. Similarly, at the end of the war, media manipulation of civilian traumas for a continuing political contest between the Sri Lankan Government and Tamil diasporic groups shut down other discursive frameworks. The more intimate stories of loss, bereavement, depression and grief were manipulated for a prolonged and bitter nationalist struggle. This article returns to a medium in which these stories were previously voiced, during the war years, in South Asian cinema. Due to government censorship of news media and limited access to the war zone, the local film industries proved to be the more cogent mediums for representing deep-rooted cultural anxieties to mainstream audiences. They conveyed everyday realities absent from news media in fictional interpretations of real events. Questions were raised regarding the affective memories and loyalties of the ethnic conflict and the role of women. The home, its destruction, displacement or re-inscription through violence became a central concern. This article focuses on three South Asian films that explored the subject of motherhood, homelessness and militarization of the ethno-cultural domestic sphere at the height of the ethnic conflict. Their shift from the urban public sites of military contest to private domestic spaces of civilian experience offered a cultural examination of political violence. By revisiting them as early conjectures of civilian trauma we ask how their interpretations of gender and place might be understood in the wake of the civil war.

Avian Geographies: An Inquiry into Nationalist Consciousness in Medieval Lanka

In the early 1980s, during the term of President Junius Richard Jayawardene, Sri Lanka’s administrative capital was moved to Kotte, a swampland southeast of Colombo, where the architect Geoffrey Bawa was commissioned to build a new parliament. The new capital was named Sri Jayewardenepura-Kotte, reviving a former name from the fifteenth century. Kottai is the Malayaali word for fort. A magnificent city named Jayavaddanapura had occupied the site during the medieval period but had fallen to the Portuguese, and was destroyed and abandoned in the resultant internecine conflicts with the nearby kingdom of Sitavaka.

South and Southeast Asia: 'The Postcolonial Legacy'

In the fields of architecture and urbanism scholarship on South and Southeast Asia has diverged considerably. While recent work on South Asia has favoured explorations of colonial period histories, scholarship on Southeast Asia has focused predominantly on contemporary urban conditions. Accordingly, the former builds on the foundations of postcolonial theory quite explicitly while the latter is concerned with the political economies of globalization. These very different theoretical lenses suggest that the politics of the region during the late twentieth century shaped architectural writing in distinct ways. This paper sets out to identify some of the characteristics of architectural writing on South and Southeast Asia in the late twentieth century and possible changes we might witness in the coming decade. It examines how interdisciplinary scholarship has pervaded the field taking it beyond empirical approaches to polemical and reflexive critiques of culture, power and the academy. The contribution and limitations of postcolonial studies is examined. This paper also raises issues of other forms of marginality and subjectivity, typically addressed by postcolonial studies, which are being superseded by techno-scientific environmental agendas.

A Treaty Needs a House: Emplacing First Peoples’ A Priori Rights in Wurundjeri Country, Metropolitan Melbourne

Charged with the tasks of giving unique and diverse cultural visibility to, creating political awareness about and economically empowering First Peoples communities, models for First Peoples cultural centres have morphed across numerous programmes in recent decades. Their transformation coincides with international attention to First Peoples rights and the creation of national First Peoples networks. Architecture is used to emplace these changing needs. This chapter examines how debates on Treaty in Victoria inform the nascent vision of a cultural, social and political institution for First Peoples communities and discusses the consultative processes and programmatic aspirations surrounding the facility. Central to this discussion are a priori rights and the host–guest relationship.