In this Situated Architecture Seminar, Dr Ikem Stanley Okoye accounts for the silenced in architectural histories, through a lens of African matriliny and colonial reconfiguration, and asks how architecture can become a space for decolonial poetics and their politics.
Ramaging the Lines?: Architecture, History, Inheritance, Gender, Property
Historical and theoretical accounts of influence or intellectual filiation – of patrons and the buildings they commissioned; architects and the buildings they produced; or theorists and historians and the buildings they selected as subjects of study – determine what is excluded in justifying a particular narrative from the messiness of the real.
Until recently, architectural histories in the Global North have traced what is bequeathed mainly through an assertion of favored heroic predecessors. But what does it mean, instead, to pay as much attention to the silenced – e.g. attending to the women left out in particular constructions? Focused on African spaces of matriliny that were challenged by colonial reconfigurations, Dr Okoye’s talk will ask what their contradictory constructions say about architecture and its history as a possible ground for decolonial poetics and their politics.
Ikem Stanley Okoye is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware, and is joint faculty in the Africana Department. Currently a Canadian Centre for Architecture/Mellon Researcher on the ‘Centring Africa’ initiative, he is working on a writing project, ‘Where was Modernism’. He has also held fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; the Center for Modern Oriental Studies, Berlin; and the Advanced Study Center at Michigan, among others.
