A Pieris
Biographic Data
| ID | 15560 |
|---|---|
| NAME | A Pieris |
| GIVEN NAMES | A |
| FAMILY NAME | Pieris |
| SIGNATURE | PIERIS A |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9422-220X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Migrant heritage, domesticity, and transnational prefabrication
The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme (Snowy Hydro) was a frontier for technological advancement, transnational expertise, and migrant labour from 1949 to 1974. This article offers a discussion of the Snowy Hydro project and its representation as part of the ‘Immigrant Networks’ exhibition held in Melbourne in 2022–23. As a multidisciplinary dialogue, it brings together perspectives from Construction History, Heritage Studies, and Architectur…
Carceral Archipelago
Chapter 1 lays out the reasoning behind the book and its investigative schema, drawing links with interpretations of incarceration familiar to the discipline. The chapter’s central argument is that the Pacific War’s imperial border contestations were inscribed in those national populations who were alienated or disenfranchised by new hostilities, and that camps treated as border facilities became places for testing cultural boundaries, advancing …
Land and Labor
Chapter 4 focuses on unguarded POW labor distribution and the farms and rural industries associated with the camps. Across the Pacific theater civilians and POWs, as well as alienated citizens (in North America), supplemented wartime industry through their nominally waged employment in manufacturing and agricultural industries. The chapter looks at the penal economy, the labor regimen and the ways in which the labor of Italian POWs became integra…
The Colonial Prison
Chapter 6 discusses the two most notorious institutions in wartime Singapore, the Changi and Outram Road prisons, with key focus on civilian internment at Changi. It describes the colonial origins of penal institutions and the erection of Changi Prison as the first modern (reinforced-concrete) penal complex. The prison’s inversion to intern colonial residents, as an act of forced removal and dispossession of once-privileged colonial civilians, is…
The Architecture of Confinement
In this global and comparative study of Pacific War incarceration environments we explore the arc of the Pacific Basin as an archipelagic network of militarized penal sites. Grounded in spatial, physical and material analyses focused on experiences of civilian internees, minority citizens, and enemy prisoners of war, the book offers an architectural and urban understanding of the unfolding history and aftermath of World War II in the Pacific. Exa…
A sense of Viidu
In the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the space for articulating a separate Tamil consciousness politicised through dissident activism and armed conflict was diminished, and Lankan Tamils were
Architecture and climate
As the environmentalist turn of the past decades gives way to a more sophisticated interrogation of the Anthropocene, what might we expect of a climatic study; a theme that has been politicised, co
Temporal Cities
This article compares two former Pacific War incarceration histories in the us and Australia, inquiring how their narratives of confinement and redress might be interpreted spatially and materially, and how these sensibilities are incorporated into contemporary heritage strategies including, in these examples, through Japanese garden designs. At the Manzanar Historic Site in California, the efforts of several generations advocating for civil righ…
Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes
During the nineteenth century, the colonial Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Melaka were established as free ports of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company's Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary exp…
People Creating Space
Tariq Jazeel, Sacred Modernity
Arterial blockages
This paper analyses the civil war in Sri Lanka as a sustained national catastrophe lasting 26 years. It studies how violence is inscribed and political ideologies of sovereignty and separation are manifest across two main arterial routes, the road and rail links between the north and the south of the island. Sutured by military check points, these arterial scars and their wartime itineraries mirror the unfolding catastrophe that surrounds them. T…
Southern invasions
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 o
Sri Lanka
On 1 December 2006, a bomb-laden trishaw travelling into oncoming traffic, rammed head-on into the convoy of Gotabhaya Rajapakse, Sri Lanka’s secretary of defence and brother to the president, in the city of Colombo, the country’s commercial capital. The vehicle exploded causing several casualties, although Rajapakse remained unhurt. The physical inscription of the incident on the city would take two forms. First, the face of a screaming man was …
The city in fiction
Plural politics and transient labour
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 anxi…
Between the home and the world in violent conflict
Throughout Sri Lanka's 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 f…
Bourgeois Self-Fashioning in India
Bourgeois Self-Fashioning in India: Domesticity, urbanity and consumption Anoma Pieris The Bungalow in Twentieth Century India: The cultural expression of changing ways of life and aspirations in the domestic architecture of colonial and post-colonial society. By Madhavi Desai, Miki Desai and John Lang. London: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. A Joint Enterprise: Indian elites and the making of British Bombay. By Preeti Chopra. Minneapolis, MN: Universi…
Occupying the centre
This article discusses Indigenous spatial and political presence within Australia's 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 Canberra's Aboriginal communities and the significance of contemporary political occupations of t…
‘Tropical’ cosmopolitanism? The untoward legacy of the American style in postindependence Ceylon/Sri Lanka
Using Homi Bhabha's discussion of vernacular cosmopolitanism as a starting point this paper attempts to reinterpret its thesis through an architectural reading of postindependence social transformations in Ceylon that coincided with the emergence of a new middle class. Inspired by American examples, suburban domestic architecture that was modest and repetitive and employed systematized construction methods made a break from a long history of labo…
Post‐tropical/post‐tsunami
Following the Indian Ocean tsunami on 26 December 2004, scenes of destruction overwrote representations of a benign tropical landscape on the eastern periphery of the Indian Ocean. The incongruous coupling of luxury resort hotels with devastated indigent fisher settlements in international media coverage had exposed the global inequities embedded in a tropical tourism industry subscribed to and abetted by states, institutions, developers and arch…
The "Other" Side of Labor Reform
The rhetoric surrounding the transportation of prisoners to the Straits Settlements and the reformative capacity of the penal labor regime assumed a uniform subject, an impoverished criminal, who could be disciplined and accordingly civilized through labor. Stamford Raffles, as lieutenant governor of Benkulen, believed that upon realizing the advantages of the new colony, criminals would willingly become settlers. These two colonial prerogatives …
Avian Geographies
Several researchers made significant efforts to conduct an inquiry into nationalist consciousness in medieval Sri Lanka. Michael Roberts was one of the researchers who attributed racial identification within the Sri Lankan polity to colonial policies of divide and rule. He stated that this thinking was characterized by an opposition to the extreme forms of nationalism expressed in South Asia during the post-independence period based on primordial…
Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes
During the nineteenth century, the colonial Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Melaka were established as free ports of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company's Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary exp…
Heritage, memory and punishment
Heritage, memory and punishment
Occupying the centre
This article discusses Indigenous spatial and political presence within Australia's 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 Canberra's Aboriginal communities and the significance of contemporary political occupations of t…
Arterial blockages
This paper analyses the civil war in Sri Lanka as a sustained national catastrophe lasting 26 years. It studies how violence is inscribed and political ideologies of sovereignty and separation are manifest across two main arterial routes, the road and rail links between the north and the south of the island. Sutured by military check points, these arterial scars and their wartime itineraries mirror the unfolding catastrophe that surrounds them. T…
Migrant heritage, domesticity, and transnational prefabrication
The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme (Snowy Hydro) was a frontier for technological advancement, transnational expertise, and migrant labour from 1949 to 1974. This article offers a discussion of the Snowy Hydro project and its representation as part of the ‘Immigrant Networks’ exhibition held in Melbourne in 2022–23. As a multidisciplinary dialogue, it brings together perspectives from Construction History, Heritage Studies, and Architectur…
Avian Geographies
Several researchers made significant efforts to conduct an inquiry into nationalist consciousness in medieval Sri Lanka. Michael Roberts was one of the researchers who attributed racial identification within the Sri Lankan polity to colonial policies of divide and rule. He stated that this thinking was characterized by an opposition to the extreme forms of nationalism expressed in South Asia during the post-independence period based on primordial…
Modernism at the Margins of the Vernacular
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, coff…
Modernism at the Margins of the Vernacular
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, coff…
Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes
During the nineteenth century, the colonial Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Melaka were established as free ports of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company's Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary exp…
Avian Geographies
Several researchers made significant efforts to conduct an inquiry into nationalist consciousness in medieval Sri Lanka. Michael Roberts was one of the researchers who attributed racial identification within the Sri Lankan polity to colonial policies of divide and rule. He stated that this thinking was characterized by an opposition to the extreme forms of nationalism expressed in South Asia during the post-independence period based on primordial…
‘Tropical’ cosmopolitanism? The untoward legacy of the American style in postindependence Ceylon/Sri Lanka
Using Homi Bhabha's discussion of vernacular cosmopolitanism as a starting point this paper attempts to reinterpret its thesis through an architectural reading of postindependence social transformations in Ceylon that coincided with the emergence of a new middle class. Inspired by American examples, suburban domestic architecture that was modest and repetitive and employed systematized construction methods made a break from a long history of labo…
Post‐tropical/post‐tsunami
Following the Indian Ocean tsunami on 26 December 2004, scenes of destruction overwrote representations of a benign tropical landscape on the eastern periphery of the Indian Ocean. The incongruous coupling of luxury resort hotels with devastated indigent fisher settlements in international media coverage had exposed the global inequities embedded in a tropical tourism industry subscribed to and abetted by states, institutions, developers and arch…
The "Other" Side of Labor Reform
The rhetoric surrounding the transportation of prisoners to the Straits Settlements and the reformative capacity of the penal labor regime assumed a uniform subject, an impoverished criminal, who could be disciplined and accordingly civilized through labor. Stamford Raffles, as lieutenant governor of Benkulen, believed that upon realizing the advantages of the new colony, criminals would willingly become settlers. These two colonial prerogatives …
Plural politics and transient labour
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 anxi…
Between the home and the world in violent conflict
Throughout Sri Lanka's 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 f…
Bourgeois Self-Fashioning in India
Bourgeois Self-Fashioning in India: Domesticity, urbanity and consumption Anoma Pieris The Bungalow in Twentieth Century India: The cultural expression of changing ways of life and aspirations in the domestic architecture of colonial and post-colonial society. By Madhavi Desai, Miki Desai and John Lang. London: Ashgate Publishing, 2012. A Joint Enterprise: Indian elites and the making of British Bombay. By Preeti Chopra. Minneapolis, MN: Universi…
Occupying the centre
This article discusses Indigenous spatial and political presence within Australia's 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 Canberra's Aboriginal communities and the significance of contemporary political occupations of t…
Sri Lanka
On 1 December 2006, a bomb-laden trishaw travelling into oncoming traffic, rammed head-on into the convoy of Gotabhaya Rajapakse, Sri Lanka’s secretary of defence and brother to the president, in the city of Colombo, the country’s commercial capital. The vehicle exploded causing several casualties, although Rajapakse remained unhurt. The physical inscription of the incident on the city would take two forms. First, the face of a screaming man was …
The city in fiction
Southern invasions
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 o
Arterial blockages
This paper analyses the civil war in Sri Lanka as a sustained national catastrophe lasting 26 years. It studies how violence is inscribed and political ideologies of sovereignty and separation are manifest across two main arterial routes, the road and rail links between the north and the south of the island. Sutured by military check points, these arterial scars and their wartime itineraries mirror the unfolding catastrophe that surrounds them. T…
Tariq Jazeel, Sacred Modernity
Temporal Cities
This article compares two former Pacific War incarceration histories in the us and Australia, inquiring how their narratives of confinement and redress might be interpreted spatially and materially, and how these sensibilities are incorporated into contemporary heritage strategies including, in these examples, through Japanese garden designs. At the Manzanar Historic Site in California, the efforts of several generations advocating for civil righ…
Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes
During the nineteenth century, the colonial Straits Settlements of Singapore, Penang, and Melaka were established as free ports of British trade in Southeast Asia and proved attractive to large numbers of regional migrants. Following the abolishment of slavery in 1833, the Straits government transported convicts from the East India Company's Indian presidencies to the settlements as a source of inexpensive labor. The prison became the primary exp…
People Creating Space
Architecture and climate
As the environmentalist turn of the past decades gives way to a more sophisticated interrogation of the Anthropocene, what might we expect of a climatic study; a theme that has been politicised, co
A sense of Viidu
In the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s civil war, the space for articulating a separate Tamil consciousness politicised through dissident activism and armed conflict was diminished, and Lankan Tamils were
Carceral Archipelago
Chapter 1 lays out the reasoning behind the book and its investigative schema, drawing links with interpretations of incarceration familiar to the discipline. The chapter’s central argument is that the Pacific War’s imperial border contestations were inscribed in those national populations who were alienated or disenfranchised by new hostilities, and that camps treated as border facilities became places for testing cultural boundaries, advancing …
Land and Labor
Chapter 4 focuses on unguarded POW labor distribution and the farms and rural industries associated with the camps. Across the Pacific theater civilians and POWs, as well as alienated citizens (in North America), supplemented wartime industry through their nominally waged employment in manufacturing and agricultural industries. The chapter looks at the penal economy, the labor regimen and the ways in which the labor of Italian POWs became integra…
The Colonial Prison
Chapter 6 discusses the two most notorious institutions in wartime Singapore, the Changi and Outram Road prisons, with key focus on civilian internment at Changi. It describes the colonial origins of penal institutions and the erection of Changi Prison as the first modern (reinforced-concrete) penal complex. The prison’s inversion to intern colonial residents, as an act of forced removal and dispossession of once-privileged colonial civilians, is…
The Architecture of Confinement
In this global and comparative study of Pacific War incarceration environments we explore the arc of the Pacific Basin as an archipelagic network of militarized penal sites. Grounded in spatial, physical and material analyses focused on experiences of civilian internees, minority citizens, and enemy prisoners of war, the book offers an architectural and urban understanding of the unfolding history and aftermath of World War II in the Pacific. Exa…
Heritage, memory and punishment
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (19 works) · History (18 works) · Archaeology (16 works) · Law (16 works) · Art (10 works) · Politics (10 works) · Geography (8 works) · South asia (8 works) · Sri lanka (8 works)