zone of characteristic nature. Originating
national parks in the western United States date
from the fin-de-siècledecades of intense nation-
alist self-definition through landscape. The
cultural significance of wilderness as the charac-
teristic American landscape, especially in the
years following Frederick Jackson Turner’s
definition of the western frontier as the founda-
tion of American democracy, has been closely
studied (Cronon, 1996; Nash, 1982; Turner,
1894). American parks established a model, sub-
sequently adopted in virtually every country in
the world, of setting aside areas of the national
territory on the basis of their landscape value and
declaring them the nation’s ‘natural’ heritage.
Park scenery varies according to the natural and
cultural landscape features deemed significant to
the image of the nation. Thus Britain’s are inhabi-
ted and farmed, but are almost exclusively
located in upland regions characterized by exten-
sive glaciated topography, moorland vegetation
and sheep farming, a cultural framing specific to
nationalist readings of landscape (Shoard, 1982).
In Sri Lanka, by contrast, the principal national
park at Yala in the south-east of the island is low-
land ‘dry jungle’, a former colonial big game
hunting region, now protected. But Yala’s
national significance derives also from its archae-
ological importance to the politically domi-
nant Sinhala and their historical relations with
the island’s Tamil minority. It is a contested
landscape, often closed to visitors because of the
threat from guerrilla separatists who find refuge
in its uninhabited spaces (Jazeel, 2000). The
clearing, bounding and purification of space that
produces and sustains such landscapes were a
recurrent feature of twentieth-century European
colonialism and are recognized by cultural
geographers as expressions of the same
processes that created aesthetic landscapes on
newly reorganized private estates (Daniels and
Seymour, 1990; Daniels et al., 1998).
The naturalness of national parks is culturally
produced and maintained by strict land use
management. Cultural markers are often absent;
indeed, many of America’s national parks had
been forcefully cleared of occupants mere
decades before they were designated. Among the
boldest and also the most poignant inscriptions of
nationhood into natural landscape is the monu-
ment carved into Mount Rushmore in South
Dakota. Displaying the heads of four American
presidents, it stands in a long tradition of monu-
mental commemorative landscapes in which a
distinctly white, male power is literally embod-
ied. It is located in the region where the Plains
Indians were finally defeated and confined to
reservations. Controlling landscape is as much asymbolic as a material act, as the monuments
raised on battlefields make visible. The capital
cities of every nation-state are designed land-
scapes whose patterns of roads and open spaces,
buildings and monuments invariably inscribe
foundation myths, public memory, constitutional
structures and heroic individuals into an icono-
graphy of nationhood (Atkinson and Cosgrove,
1998; Schama, 1995: 385–401; Warnke, 1994:
53–74). The iconography of such urban land-
scapes offers opportunities too for challenge,
resistance and subversion of official meanings,
as the fate of Lenin statues in nations of the
former Soviet Union testifies (Bell, 1999;
Michalski, 1998; Smith, 1999; Till, 1999).Colonial landscapeW.T. Mitchell has called landscape ‘the dream-
work of empire’. He is referring to the spatial and
social perceptions, assumptions and practices
that accompanied European expansion into non-
European regions of the globe. Postcolonial
study finds in landscape a valuable concept for
examining the cultural aspects of colonialism.
That colonization by definition involves appro-
priation and occupation of land permits a
reworking of cultural geographers’ long-standing
interest in the overseas transfer, diffusion and
simplification of European modes of occupance
(Norton, 2000: 96–7). Colonization entailed a
certain blindness to pre-existing cultural land-
scapes, evident for example in their figuring as
‘new worlds’, wilderness or discovered Edens.
Prior occupants were connected to ‘nature’ by
means of a limited number of landscape tropes
derived from a stock of European stereotypes:
golden-age innocents, wild savages, cannibals,
nomadic hunters and gathers and pastoralists. In
every case they were regarded as subjects of
nature rather than its ‘masters’. Their landscapes
could not therefore be ‘cultural’. A consistent
feature in the European management of colonial
space was the enforced sedentarization of native
populations and the division of usufruct land into
plotted and bounded properties. This was simul-
taneously a means of bodily control, of intensi-
fied economic exploitation and of accelerating
what the colonizers took to be the cultural ‘evo-
lution’ of native peoples (Noyes, 2000). The out-
come was a new landscape whose visible order,
signified by fenced property lines, geometrically
distributed farms and villages, prompted com-
parison with picturesque European landscape
(Doughty, 1982). Visible order in the landscape
became to European eyes a justification of the
colonizing mission. Evidence of previous native264 LANDSCAPE3029-ch12.qxd 03-10-02 5:49 PM Page 264