Projecting the New Nation: visual and spatial representations of Sri Lanka at international expos, 1967-1970
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper discusses the ‘projection’ of Sri Lanka through visual and spatial representations at the Montreal Expo, Canada (1967) and the Osaka Expo, Japan (1970). It assesses the representation of national and cultural identity in the decades immediately following independence, especially in relation to the negotiation of (colonial) history and modernity. \n \nThe Sri Lanka pavilion at Montreal was housed in a building which referenced Sinhala-Buddhist vernacular architecture. The pavilion at Osaka, by contrast, presented a structure of two conjoined modernist white cubes, apparently making no reference to the local. Although ostensibly differing in their architectural structure and interior display, both pavilions sought to convey a visual and haptic experience of an autonomous Sri Lankan national and cultural identity. A significant aspect of the representational strategies of both pavilions was the projection of an imagined pre-colonial and Sinhala-Buddhist history and identity. \n \nThe interior of the Montreal pavilion included crowded displays of Buddhist artefacts, art and culture that were reminiscent of colonial exhibitions together with one contemporary Sri Lankan art work. The interior of the Osaka pavilion, whilst superficially more ‘cosmopolitan’ in its layout and display, also recapitulated the manner in which colonialism ‘museumized’ ancient cultures. \n \nThe overall message of the Osaka pavilion was oblique, its modernist styling seeming to contradict expression of national identity. Deploying modernism as a representational strategy signified a nation unfettered by colonial historicism. However, the arrangement of the interior and ambiguous intentionality of its design complicated this perception. \nIn conclusion, both pavilions were attempts to discursively structure a space for the projection of ‘postcolonial modernity’. However, each pavilion negotiated the island’s histories in differing ways. In both, ideological constructions originating in colonialism were reworked and, at Osaka, contemporized to produce a mono-cultural narrative that conflated Sinhala-Buddhist identity with the nation state of Sri Lanka \n
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".