Queer Ecologies and Anti-Colonial Abundance in Lionel Wendt's Ceylon

Abstract

Published posthumously in 1950, queer Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt's photobook Ceylon crafted an aesthetic of queer environmental abundance. His photographs, ranging from documentary-style to surrealist-inspired images, were taken between 1933 and 1944, shaped by and contributing to rising waves of national consciousness and anti-colonial movements ahead of the island's independence in 1948. British rule since 1815 had destroyed common land and outlawed homosexuality for being ‘against the order of nature’. Wendt sought to confront and challenge colonial control over both ecology and sexuality, imagining alternative possibilities through both experimental and social realist photography. Other queer representations of the island (by Bevis Bawa, Ernst Haeckel and Edward Carpenter) are considered alongside the photographer's collaboration with queer, anti-imperialist filmmaker Basil Wright. Drawing on a queer ecological methodology and decolonial theory, this essay argues that Ceylon celebrated a queer environmental aesthetic of abundance by picturing Sri Lankan sexuality and landscapes as unbounded by colonial rule.