After the Global Turn: Current Colonial, Decolonial and Postcolonial Perspectives in Architecture

Dear Colleagues,

What is the status of postcolonial and decolonial discourse in architecture? How has the “global turn” in architectural discourse evolved from histories of contact, conquest and colonization? Forty years ago, the influential essays of “‘Race,’ Writing and Difference” appeared in Critical Inquiry (Gates, 1985, 1986). Essays by Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Hazel Carby, Jacques Derrida, Abdul R. JanMohamed, and others created new critical models that interrogated how difference had been inscribed as “race” and explored the complex interactions of race, writing and difference, which influenced architectural history and theory for several decades. That same year, Spiro Kostof’s textbook A History of Architecture (1985) spurred a “global turn” in architecture that has complicated the field’s canon. The new global discourse seeks to understand contemporary globalization as manifested in the built environment, exemplified by the foundation of the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC) and the publication of multiple volumes on global architecture. The global turn has attempted to close the dichotomies of East and West, North and South imposed by earlier colonial and postcolonial theories, such as Edward Said’s formulation of Orientalism as the Occident’s “other” (Said, 1978). Perspectives from the “Global South” have emerged as important correctives to the hegemony of Northern Hemisphere-centered scholarship and practice. What has resulted from this “turn” has been ambiguous, however, as it often focuses on architects from the Global North operating in the Global South or developments modeled after Western architecture and urban design, without a concomitant innovation in truly global approaches and subject matter.

This Special Issue aims to explore the field’s development from colonial, decolonial and postcolonial theory to the global turn and beyond. We encourage papers that take innovative approaches to the colonial, postcolonial, decolonial and global in architecture, including such topics as:

• Transnational connections and flows in excess of political boundaries;
• Decentered models of global architecture;
• Race and architecture;
• Feminist, subaltern and minor perspectives on architecture,
• Empire and decolonization;
• Migration;
• Indigenous architecture;
• Informal architecture;
• Landscapes of extraction and dispossession;
• Modernization and development;
• Other perspectives.

References

Critical Inquiry: Autumn 1985 (vol. 12, no. 1) and Autumn 1986 (vol. 13, no. 1); Henry Louis Gates, ed. “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative https://www.gahtc.org/.

Kostof, Spiro. A History of Architecture: Settings and Rituals. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Representations of the Orient. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978.

Dr. Patricia Morton
Guest Editor

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• colonialism
• colonization
• settler colonialism
• empire
• decolonial
• postcolonial
• global history 
• transnational 
• race 
• migration 
• gender 
• indigenous