World-Making After Empire: Spatial Reflections on the Postcolonial
Seminar Topical Questions in the History of Architecture (052-0852-22)
Organizer: Visiting Lectureship Kennedy
Lecturers: Dr. Hollyamber Kennedy
Time: Thursdays, 11.45 - 13.30
Location: HIL E 7
Livestream
What do we mean by the terms colonialism, imperialism, postcolonialism, decoloniality, and coloniality, and how do they intersect with and unsettle studies of territory, land, and landscape and of the built and spatially imagined environment? Using postcolonial thought as our lens, this course introduces students to the core ideas and key methodological strategies that inform critical spatial inquiries into the colonial past and its enduring present. Charting the development of a movement in thought that disavowed and sought to expose and understand the violence of colonialism, this course will explore recent narrative trends in architectural history that have taken seriously the imperatives of these discourses of freedom and independence and their analysis of the self-mythologizing power of the West. We will closely engage scholarship and place making that works to rethink and reclaim marginalized and ephemeral aesthetic histories and agencies.
This is a reading and discussion-based seminar. The aim is to introduce students to the core ideas and key methodological strategies that inform critical spatial inquiries into the colonial past and its enduring present. Students will be introduced to these concepts and methods through close readings of classic polemical texts that have shaped the arc of postcolonial thought and criticism, paying close attention to the political and intellectual contexts from which these texts emerged as examples of embodied and situated knowledge. Each week, these readings will be paired with a representative text of architectural history, as a window onto the decolonial movements taking shape within the field.
We will approach the subject of decolonial and postcolonial critique from an intersectional perspective, considering its close relation to the many currents of thought that it sits alongside, including critical studies of race and ethnicity, feminist and trans/queer criticism, anticolonial criticism, cultural studies, and minority and indigenous studies, all of which generated new entry points into the study of the colonial past and present. Thinking with Ania Loomba, we will ask how ongoing struggles, such as those of indigenous peoples and threatened lands, and the enclosure of the commons in different parts of the world, shed light on the long histories of colonialism.
Syllabus
Recordings
Moodle link
Dr. Holly Amber Kennedy
Carolina Contreras Alvarez
Organizer: Visiting Lectureship Kennedy
Lecturers: Dr. Hollyamber Kennedy
Time: Thursdays, 11.45 - 13.30
Location: HIL E 7
Livestream
What do we mean by the terms colonialism, imperialism, postcolonialism, decoloniality, and coloniality, and how do they intersect with and unsettle studies of territory, land, and landscape and of the built and spatially imagined environment? Using postcolonial thought as our lens, this course introduces students to the core ideas and key methodological strategies that inform critical spatial inquiries into the colonial past and its enduring present. Charting the development of a movement in thought that disavowed and sought to expose and understand the violence of colonialism, this course will explore recent narrative trends in architectural history that have taken seriously the imperatives of these discourses of freedom and independence and their analysis of the self-mythologizing power of the West. We will closely engage scholarship and place making that works to rethink and reclaim marginalized and ephemeral aesthetic histories and agencies.
This is a reading and discussion-based seminar. The aim is to introduce students to the core ideas and key methodological strategies that inform critical spatial inquiries into the colonial past and its enduring present. Students will be introduced to these concepts and methods through close readings of classic polemical texts that have shaped the arc of postcolonial thought and criticism, paying close attention to the political and intellectual contexts from which these texts emerged as examples of embodied and situated knowledge. Each week, these readings will be paired with a representative text of architectural history, as a window onto the decolonial movements taking shape within the field.
We will approach the subject of decolonial and postcolonial critique from an intersectional perspective, considering its close relation to the many currents of thought that it sits alongside, including critical studies of race and ethnicity, feminist and trans/queer criticism, anticolonial criticism, cultural studies, and minority and indigenous studies, all of which generated new entry points into the study of the colonial past and present. Thinking with Ania Loomba, we will ask how ongoing struggles, such as those of indigenous peoples and threatened lands, and the enclosure of the commons in different parts of the world, shed light on the long histories of colonialism.
Syllabus
Recordings
Schedule
- Seminar 01 - 24.02.2022: Introduction | Rhodes Must Fall, Decolonizing the University
- Seminar 02 - 03.03.2022: World-Making After Empire | Discourses of Decolonization
- Guest speakers Khensani de Klerk and Shriya Chaudhry
- Seminar 03 - 10.03.2022: The Counter-Map | Representations, Resistance, and Traces in the Land
- Guest speaker Sara Frikech
- Seminar 04 - 17.03.2022: Subaltern Agency I | History from Below, The Subaltern Studies Group
- Guest speaker Rafico Ruiz
- Seminar 05 - 31.03.2022: Subaltern Agency II | The Archive and its Limits
- Guest speaker Faiq Mari
- Seminar 06 - 07.04.2022: Provincializing Europe | Provincializing Modernism and Rurality
- Seminar 07 - 14.04.2022: Decolonial Feminisms | Centering Difference and Marginality
- Guest speaker Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi
- Seminar 08 - 28.04.2022: Coloniality | The Latin American Subaltern Studies group
- Seminar 09 - 05.05.2022: Decoloniality | Epistemic Disobedience
- Seminar 10 - 12.05.2022: D-Arch Research Day | Panel: Territorial Ecologies
- Seminar 11 - 19.05.2022: Planetarity | The Earthly Commons
- Guest speaker Nitin Bathla
Readings and other media
- [L]Seminar 01: Akwugo Emejulu, “Another University is Possible.”, Interview with Achille Mbembe, Sindre Bangstad and Torbjørn Tumyr Nilsen, “Thoughts on the Planetary: An Interview with Achille Mbembe” and Alessandro Petti, “Decolonizing Knowledge”
- Seminar 02: Frantz Fanon, “On Violence” , Aimé Césaire, selection from "Discourse on Colonialism" and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “The University and the Camp”
- Seminar 03: Edward Said, “Empire, Geography, and Culture” , Edward Said, “Resistance, Opposition, and Representation” and Zeynep Çelik, “Le Corbusier, Orientalism, Colonialism,”
- Seminar 04: Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency [1983]” , Rafico Ruiz, “Introduction. First Fish, then Mediation” and Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, a Subaltern Studies Workshop, “Panel Discussion on ‘The Peasant, Then and Now: Thirty Years of Ranajit Guha’s Elementary Aspects”
- Seminar 05: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak” , Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits” , Huda Tayob, “Transnational Practices of Care and Refusal” and Duke University Press and New Books Network: “Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future”
- Seminar 06: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Introduction” , Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Mabel O. Wilson, “Introduction” and Columbia GSAPP, “Critical Dialogues on Race and Modern Architecture”
- Seminar 07: Trinh T. Minh-ha, “No Master Territories” , Homi Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders” , Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Writing With: Togethering, Difference and Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” and Pluto Press and Red Menace: “A Decolonial Feminism with Françoise Vergès”
- Seminar 08: [/I]Annibal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity / Rationality” , Samia Henni, “Colonial Ramifications” and ARA—Antirasistiska Akademin, “Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Coloniality of Power and Metaphysical Catastrophe” , Nelson Maldonado-Torres, "On the Coloniality of Being"
- Seminar 09: Itohan Osayimwese, "From Postcolonial to Decolonial Architectural History: A Method", [I]Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, “Introduction” , Walter D. Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom” and Red Menace, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor – Tuck & Yang”
- Seminar 10: European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture, “Affirmative Sabotage”
- Seminar 11: Achille Mbembe, “The Earthly Community”, Interview with Lewis R. Gordon, Madina Tlostanova, “Shifting the Geography of Reason” and Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Witwatersrand, “The Planetary Library”
Moodle link
Contact
Dr. Holly Amber Kennedy
Carolina Contreras Alvarez
