105 POSTCOLONIAL POSSIBILITIES OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY: Questions and Concerns in reading the Urbanisms of the Global South Abstract: As the twenty-first century unfolds before us, the megacities of Global South experience unprecedented urbanization characterized by informalizations of urban spaces. While several new theoretical perspectives from fields such as geography, sociology, and urban planning are contributing heavily in understanding and explaining these mega-urbanisms of the Global South and their complicated and contested narratives, Architectural History, as a discipline, still struggles to articulate these transformations meaningfully. In the context of this epistemological dichotomy, this paper delves into an academic multilogue between architectural history as a methodological apparatus to read and understand space, recent theoretical insights from related built-environment disciplines that reflect on the Global South, and critical theories that help us understand socio-spatial processes, productions, and practices. In doing so, this paper first critiques the role of architectural history in its inability to include much of the spatial narratives of the Global South and questions the canonical understandings of architecture that most of its present academic pedagogy perpetuates. Second, it discusses the potentials of how and what architectural history and theory can learn from contemporary discourses in neighboring subjects. Third, it calls for a postcolonial intervention into architectural history and theory to enunciate the spatial narratives of the understudied Global South. Further, by configuring a critical conversation between theoretical perspectives such as Bhabha’s ‘hybridity’, Lefebvre’s triad of spatial productions, Certeau’s ‘strategies and tactics,’ Bayat’s ‘quiet encroachment,’ and Harvey’s ‘insurgent architect’ this paper proposes an analytical framework that might help us read the complex, entangled, and contested urbanisms of the Global South and the history of their architectural productions. Keywords: Architectural history, postcolonial studies, Global South INTRODUCTION There has been a long-standing epistemological dichotomy in architectural studies, which is of serious concern to various scholars of the Global South today. While on the one hand, architectural history fails to accommodate the spatial narratives of unprecedented massive urbanization processes in twenty-first century megacities, on the other hand, postcolonial studies hardly capture the architectural movements of these societies. This investigation picks up on this juncture and critically analyzes this gap. Building on this, it further speculates on the possible intersection between postcolonial theory and architectural history, and sheds light upon how such an intersection might give us new directions for understanding the questions and concerns that are necessary to read the urbanisms of Global South societies today. This paper has three parts. First, by tracing various developments in architectural history and by referring to some key texts from the last century, I discuss why and how architectural history falls short in its scope to discuss spatial productions and practices in the context of the Global South, and highlight why such a limitation is of concern. Second, I refer to emergent research in associated built environment disciplines that reveal similarities with architectural inquiries to trace how they have studied the “megacity” in Global South, in order to shed light on possible crossroads. Finally, in the third part, I use several examples of critical scholarship from postcolonial and poststructural theories and propose an analytical framework that may lead to a possible postcolonial intervention in architectural history. 1. LIMITATIONS OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY Architectural history, hitherto primarily produced in Europe and America, has not been able to talk much about societies of the Global South. Western historians who have written about the non-West have, by the very weight of the category, studied it through, what Said has discussed as an orientalist lens (Bozdogan 1999; Akcan 2016). In particular, for the period from the mid- nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, not only do we not have architectural accounts of the different histories that shaped the postcolonial Global South, but we also do not have scholarship that reflects upon the sense of ‘architecture’ that emerges from and represents the built environment and spatial practices of these geographies. Soumya Dasgupta University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
POSTCOLONIAL POSSIBILITIES OF ARCHITECTURAL HISTORY: Questions and Concerns in reading the Urbanisms of the Global South
May 06, 2023
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