02 Feb What Frameworks Should We Use to Read the Spatial History of the Americas?
An outline of the assigned reading that includes thesis of the reading, 3-5 critical points and your assessment of the effectiveness of the reading.
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roundtable
What Frameworks Should We Use to Read the Spatial History of the Americas?
Editor’s note: In an ongoing effort to advance conversations on critical contemporary issues in JSAH, this issue features a roundtable that explores ways to decolonize the spatial his- tory of the Americas, curated by guest editor Fernando Luiz Lara, University of Texas at Austin. I would like to thank Dr. Lara for organizing the roundtable, and his contributors for their thought-provoking essays. —DK
Editor’s Introduction: Unlearning Eurocentrism
I believe we have, by now, a disciplinary consensus that our traditional Eurocentric canon of architectural history is insufficient (albeit fundamental), and that we are indeed mak- ing an effort to fill the gaps. The expansion of our knowledge base has been significant in the twenty-first century. The Berkeley school of vernacularism, for instance, has trained two generations of scholars devoted to the study of the total- ity of our built environment, even if their work is still very U.S.-centric. On the East Coast, MIT’s Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative has successfully pushed the Anglo scholarship in another direction, expanding its geo- graphical scope. And yet such expansion efforts, whether vertical (high- to lowbrow) as at Berkeley or horizontal (geo- graphical) as at MIT, have limited transformational powers because they do not tell us what to unlearn. The work of any historian involves crafting a narrative, and this means deter- mining what should enter the narrative and what should not. The latter types of decisions are much more difficult than the former. Jorge Luis Borges evokes this dilemma in his short story “Funes el memorioso,” which suggests that a being whose memory holds on to every little detail is ultimately in- capable of thinking. Reason (and emotion, for that matter) requires that we privilege some memories and relegate others to the subconscious. As we all know from recent curriculum
debates, the discussion around architectural history surveys becomes heated whenever we consider pushing aside parts of our canonical knowledge to make space for new manifesta- tions. As Swati Chattopadhyay proposes in Unlearning the City and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay argues in Potential History, there is plenty we need to unlearn.1 In January 2022, as I worked on the second round of edits of this JSAH round- table, I encountered many questions around unlearning as explored by a range of authors, including Chattopadhyay, Mabel Wilson, Peter Christensen, Ana María León, and Charles Davis.2
Unlearning is one of the most urgent tasks of our times. We should all ask ourselves what we need to unlearn, and my own answer gravitates toward the decolonial theories that emerged from Latin America in the past decades. Latin American intellectuals elaborated an extensive body of work that taught me the most about what I need to un- learn, and I want to briefly cite the most important works framing the argument that in turn drives this roundtable conversation.3 In the late 1950s, Edmundo O’Gorman demonstrated that the encounter with the Americas trig- gered European modernization, rather than the other way around. In the 1970s, Aníbal Quijano in Peru, Milton San- tos in Brazil, and Pablo Gonzales Casanova in Mexico all examined different aspects of colonialism as the roots of underdevelopment and persistent inequality.4 By the turn of the millennium, the work of Walter Mignolo, Arturo Escobar, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, María Lugones, and Denise Ferreira da Silva helped me to break the epistemo- logical barriers that defined any architecture not produced by European white males as peripheral, and enabled me to move my own scholarship in new directions.5 As an expert on twentieth-century architecture and urbanism in Latin America, I wrote extensively on the need to include that re- gion in broader conversations, but now I realize that I spent two decades adjectivizing modernization in order to explain those Latin American manifestations. I wrote about modern architecture in Latin American as peripheral, or con- servative, or insufficient. After readingMignolo and Escobar, I realized that coloniality is inherent to any modernity, and that our modern national boundaries also represent colonial
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Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 81, no. 2 (June 2022), 134–153, ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2022 by the Society of Architectural Historians. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.ucpress .edu/journals/reprints-permissions, or via email: [email protected] DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2022.81.2.134.
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legacies that have erased the common past of all of the Amer- icas (Figure 1).
Reflecting on that shared history, I argue that the rise of architecture as a unique discipline and the European con- quest of the American continent are not just chronological coincidences; rather, they are interdependent variables of the same process of modernization.6 Traditional architectural scholarship has not yet entertained those parallel develop- ments, treating the spatial occupation of the Americas as a consequence of the Renaissance and a by-product of European modernization. In 1992 Quijano synthesized the argument with the thesis that “it is not that the Americas had a significant role in the development of capitalism, there would be no capitalism if not for the occupation of the Americas.”7 I propose that the same applies to our disci- pline: it is not that the Americas had a significant role in the development of architecture as we know it, but instead that there would be no modern architecture if not for the European occupation of the Americas.
Students of architecture know that the process of design abstraction took form in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is a disciplinary consensus that spatial abstraction is the main component of the modern process of architectural de- sign, and it is no coincidence that the European occupation of the Americas happened at exactly the same time, as I have discussed at length in other publications.8 My work on docu- menting and analyzing favela structures has taught me that abstraction is indeed the main difference between what is de- signed and what is not.9
What decolonial theories have taught me most recently is that spatial abstraction is an accelerator—not only of improve- ment, as Alfonso Corona-Martínez has proposed, but also of modernity, and by extension of coloniality.10 My point here, learned from contemporary scholars who engage Indigenous knowledge in an effort to advance epistemic decolonization, is that the rise of spatial abstraction in the sixteenth century
killed relational processes and non-Eurocentric knowledges that we urgently need to bring back to the table.11We need to develop American concepts to improve our understanding of the spatial history of our continent. We need to unlearn the hegemony of spatial abstraction to allow other knowledges to permeate the design process.
For this roundtable addressing the question of what frameworks we should use to read the spatial history of the Americas, I was inspired by the work of curators Andrea Giunta and Agustín Pérez Rubio at the Museo de Arte Lat- inoamericano de Buenos Aires. In 2016, Giunta and Pérez reorganized MALBA’s main collection—the best in Latin American modern art—under new categories in an exhibi- tion titled Verboamérica. Following the lead of Joaquín Torres-García’s famous 1934 drawing América invertida, which reverses the map of South America, placing south at the top and north at the bottom, the exhibition reshuffled a collection previously arranged according to European concepts of impressionism, cubism, abstractionism, op art, and so on. Based on a detailed reading of Latin America’s history and geography, Giunta and Pérez proposed new categories, which included “In the Beginning”; “Maps, Geopolitics, and Power”; “Lettered City, Violent City, Imagined City”; “Work, Crowd, and Resistance”; “Bodies, Affects, and Emancipation”; and “Indigenous America, Black America.” The resulting displays found works by León Ferrari alongside those of Roberto Matta, Emiliano Di Cavalcanti alongside David Alfaro Siqueiros, Mathias Goeritz alongside Mira Schendel, and Wilfredo Lam alongside Claudia Andujar. The prior arrangement of works according to European trends invoked ideas that the works might or might not have even engaged. MALBA’s main collection returned to its Eurocentric organization after a few months, but the reshuffle generated enough synaptic stimulation and synergies to inspire decades of scholarship. The Latin American idea of verbos (from the Latin “word”) offers concepts that we can use to unlearn Eurocentrism.
In this roundtable we start to explore the development of concepts (verbos) that could enhance our understanding of the spatial history of the American continent. “Embodiment” (addressed by Arijit Sen), “Indigenous spatial agency” (Wanda Dalla Costa and Shawna Cunningham), “wounded landscapes” (Magdalena Novoa), “delinking” (Felipe Her- nández), “militarization” (Juan Luis Burke), “labor exploita- tion” (María Gonzáles Pendáz), and “whiteness” (Bryan E. Norwood) represent seven verbos that we can use to anchor the history of our built environment on the living experiences of our continent. The unlearning that they encourage offers much to teach us all.
FERNANDO LUIZ LARA
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN
Figure 1 Fernando Luiz Lara, “AmericanMirror,” collage, 2020 (Fernando
Luiz Lara, “American Mirror: The Occupation of the ‘New World’ and the
Rise of Architecture as We Know It,” Plan Journal 5, no. 1 [2020]).
WHAT FRAMEWORKS SHOULD WE USE TO READ THE SPAT I A L H I S TORY OF THE AMER I CAS ? 135
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Notes 1. Swati Chattopadhyay, Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012); Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (London: Verso, 2019). 2. See the “Unlearning” series on the digital forum Platform, 2021–22, https://www.platformspace.net/home/unlearning-part-ii (accessed 31 Jan. 2022). 3. In their roundtable essays, Felipe Hernández and Juan Luis Burke also elaborate on different aspects of Latin American decolonial theory that speak directly to the history of architecture. 4. Aníbal Quijano, “The Marginal Pole of the Economy and the Marginal- ized Labour Force,” Economy and Society 3, no. 4 (1974), 393–428;Milton San- tos, Espaço e método (São Paulo: Nobel, 1985); Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, “Internal Colonialism andNational Development,” Studies in Comparative In- ternational Development 1, no. 4 (1965), 27–37. 5. Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, eds., Globalization and the Decolonial Option (London: Routledge, 2009); Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “Ch’ixinakax ut- xiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization,” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 1 (2012), 95–109; María Lugones, “Colonialidad y género,” Tabula Rasa 9 (2008), 73–101; Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). 6. Fernando Luiz Lara, “American Mirror: The Occupation of the ‘New World’ and the Rise of Architecture as We Know It,” Plan Journal 5, no. 1 (2020), 71–88. 7. Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept, or the Americas in the Modern World-System,” International Social Science Jour- nal 44, no. 134 (1992), 549. 8. Lara, “American Mirror”; Fernando Luiz Lara, “Abstraction Is a Privi- lege,” Platform, 7 June 2021, https://www.platformspace.net/home/abstrac- tion-is-a-privilege (accessed 20 Jan. 2022). 9. Fernando Luiz Lara, “Illiterate Modernists: Tracking the Dissemination of Architectural Knowledge in Brazilian Favelas,” in Housing and Belonging in Latin America, ed. Christien Klaufus and Arij Ouweneel (New York: Ber- ghahn, 2015), 209–22; Fernando Luiz Lara, Excepcionalidad del modernismo brasileño (São Paulo: Romano Guerra Editora, 2019). 10. Alfonso Corona-Martínez, The Architectural Project, ed. Malcolm Quantrill, trans. Alfonso Corona-Martínez and Malcolm Quantrill (Col- lege Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003). 11. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: Una reflexión sobre prácti- cas y discursos descolonizadores (Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón, 2010); Gloria Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009); Luis E. Cárcamo-Huechante, “Indig- enous Interference: Mapuche Use of Radio in Times of Acoustic Colonial- ism,” Latin American Research Review 48 (2013), 50–68.
Embodiment as a Category of Analysis in Architectural History
Immigrants travel light; they also carry their past with them corporeally, as values, inflections, practices, emotional re- sponses, routine behaviors, memories of fleeting smells, soundscapes, and rhythms that animate their senses.1 As they move across national boundaries, they remember, reconstrue, and reconstruct their world with this embodied knowledge.2
InHow Societies Remember, Paul Connerton argues that multi- sensory bodily engagements produce incorporating practices that are also embodied because they entail a combination of cognitive memory and “habit-memory” and are influenced by internalized values, accepted maxims, and customs that are
deeply emic and cultural in nature.3 This taken-for-granted logic of incorporating practice produced by kinesthetic, hap- tic, and sensory engagement with place is central to the way immigrants reproduce their world.4
Take the example of Hari Singh Everest (1916–2011), an emigrant from India who embarked on his journey to the United States in December 1954. In 1956, Everest drew two sketches, one to describe his childhood home in Lahore (in pre-Partition India, now in Pakistan) and another to depict his new home in theUnited States (Figures 2 and 3). The first image centered on a courtyard, drawn as a stage for multiple lived moments. A spinning wheel and a handmade stool in the top corner conjured up moments when family members gathered. At the bottom edge, Everest drew a workspace with a plough, ostensibly under repair. His sketch described an an- cestral home not merely as a physical object consisting of walls and floors but as a theatrical stage filled with events per- formed in the courtyard. The second sketch, made three months later, also presented the courtyard as a social stage,
Figure 2 Hari Singh Everest, “Behind the Crescent: My Country Home It
Was Once,” sketch, 16 March 1956 (Drawings, Hari Singh Everest
Gallery, Pioneering Punjabis Digital Archives, Regents of the University of
California).
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but populated instead with people from Everest’s life in the United States. In these delicately executed drawings, archi- tecture served as a mise-en-scène for lived moments and so- cial interactions.
Sixteen years later, in 1972, in a letter to the editor of Sikh Sansar, Everest brought up an issue about a story he had writ- ten that the journal had accepted for publication. He tried to clarify that the city he described in that story was not the city of Rupar in Punjab, India, where the author had once lived. The editors had mistakenly assumed so because Everest’s de- scription of places and locations seemed to resemble scenes from Rupar. Everest’s letter was intended to rectify that error and clarify that in reality he was describing Yuba City in California. He explained, “Obviously, I was carried away by my imagination. Yet, the reality was not left far behind,” as the landscape of the California town felt similar to his home- town in Punjab, and the buildings and social life in Yuba City replicated his experiences of familiar scenes in Rupar.5 Ever- est purposefully intended to use an ambiguous description to make a point about the equivalency of the two places.
In these instances, Everest was not merely remembering home, he was actively and imaginatively constructing place in an alien land. Karen Leonard sees Everest’s politics of place making as a “purposeful erasure” that carefully ignored the
presence of white Americans and left out the racial conflict that he actually experienced in Yuba City.6 His narratives are akin to what Magdalena Novoa, in her study of “wounded landscapes” in this roundtable, describes as a “different way of knowing and writing” practiced by individuals and groups who have experienced exclusion to “repair their psychosocial and spatial wounds.”
Indeed, mid-twentieth-century Sikh immigrants com- monly used embodied knowledge to reproduce place. As products of the long, destructive history of British colonial- ism, they found themselves doubly marginalized—both in newly independent India and in the United States. Like im- migrants before him, Everest did not have the material and architectural presence on the U.S. landscape that white Americans had. During the first five decades of the twentieth century, many Sikh immigrants experienced their world through mobility rather than stability, compelled to adapt to temporary spaces because they did not own property.7 They endowed places with values and meanings by using past em- bodied knowledge to claim ownership of place. Everest’s evocative mental imagery in his Sikh Sansar article laid claim to an otherwise adversarial landscape in the New World as the home space of a diasporic community, demonstrating a form of resistance against what Bryan Norwood refers to in this roundtable as the hidden “spatiality of whiteness,” which claims full ownership of land and property rights.
In his introduction to the roundtable, Fernando Lara critiques an epistemological strategy of abstraction that architectural scholars and historians have used to discern the built environment. This strategy imparts value to the world around us, rendering many Indigenous, Black, and immigrant landscapes irrelevant (and invisible) as spaces unworthy of analysis. Yet Everest’s story points toward an oppositional and resistant practice of abstraction, in which it is the immigrant who abstracts, reappropriates, and reimagines California’s racialized and hostile terrain as his homeland.
Using embodiment as a framework to consider place and the history of place requires a careful examination of how humans sense time and space.8 On the one hand, Everest’s description of Yuba City demonstrates how his sense of place is organized by memories of topography—a landscape pro- duced over a longue durée of environmental time. On the other hand, his comparison of buildings in Rupar with those in Yuba City refers to a memory of place that was built over the course of what Michael Herzfeld calls social time.9
Within this context Everest remembers familiar moments, ephemeral daily routines, and protean human interactions.10
It is precisely this vast epistemic scope—from the instanta- neous to the historical, from the experience of the body poli- tic to that of the human body—that confounds the way we understand embodiment and place.
Figure 3 Hari Singh Everest, “Reality: With an American Child,” sketch,
24 June 1956 (Drawings, Hari Singh Everest Gallery, Pioneering Punjabis
Digital Archives, Regents of the University of California).
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Many architectural historians prefer to study monuments, the oeuvres of professional architects, or tangible landscapes as objects of architectural historiography.11 Immigrants are not unfamiliar with that world, but they learn to survive and circumvent it by creating alternate worlds that are invisible, unfathomable, and imperceptible to outsiders. In order to explore the evanescent world of immigrants, we must turn our focus toward the everyday routine behaviors and body rhythms (or “tempos,” a term used by Pierre Bourdieu) in- grained in and internalized by people such as Everest, who may then deploy these practices to re-create a familiar sense of place in alien (and alienating) settings.12 Everest’s world making urges us to expand our methodological focus from an analysis of the material and the visible to a study of somatic experiences—such as proprioception, smell, and sound—that enable immigrants to construct worlds that are transient and often invisible to outsiders.13 Such ephemeral places cannot be captured through traditional techniques of architectural documentation.14 In addition to gathering oral histories and engaging in ethnographic and observational methods, the historian needs to read archival information “against the grain,” searching for ways to creatively reconstruct the lived world of immigrants from available documents.15 There are ethical implications to rendering visible that which has been obscure. Could such research open up immigrant worlds to actions of discipline and punishment by the state and its agents of surveillance and injustice? Embodied place making is inherently political in nature, and therefore such re- search also has the potential to empower and encourage lo- cal resistance against structural forms of injustice.16 When we acknowledge the importance of embodiment in the production of place, we cease to see architecture as a stable system of material assemblage and instead begin to experi- ence it as lived and transient event spaces that unfold in a world organized by networks of relationships and past know- ing, networks that are reproduced in symbolic, experiential, affective, and sensory ways.17 This realization has much in common with the “Indigenous approach” that Wanda Dalla Costa and Shawna Cunningham describe in their essay in this roundtable as a relational worldview of “being and doing within a living landscape.” Focusing on embodiment and architecture can help us to better understand the rich worlds of immigrants and marginalized groups in North America.
ARIJIT SEN
UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MILWAUKEE
Notes 1. On traveling light but with a heavy burden, see Rosemary Marangoly George, “Traveling Light: Of Immigration, Invisible Suitcases, and Gunny Sacks,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 4, no. 2 (1992), 72–99. 2. See, for instance, Dalia Zein, “Embodied Placemaking: Filipina Migrant Domestic Workers’ Neighborhood in Beirut,” Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of
Middle East and North African Migration Studies 7, no. 2 (2020), https://lebane sestudies.ojs.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/mashriq/article/view/276 (accessed 12 Sept. 2021); Deirdre McKay, “Everyday Places: Philippine Place-Making and the Translocal Quotidian” (paper presented at the Cultural Studies Associa- tion of Australasia conference “Everyday Transformations: The Twenty-First Century Quotidian,” 9–11 Dec. 2004), https://www.researchgate.net/publica tion/228464794_Everyday_places-Philippine_place-making_and_the_trans local_quotidian (accessed 12 Sept. 2021); Martin F. Manalansan IV, “Im- migrant Lives and the Politics of Olfaction in the Global City,” in The Smell Culture Reader, ed. Jim Drobnick (New York: Berg, 2006), 41–52. See also the essays collected in Jeffrey Hou, ed., Transcultural Cities: Bor- der Crossing and Placemaking (New York: Routledge, 2013). 3. Paul Connerton, “Bodily Practices,” in How Societies Remember (Cam- bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 88. 4. I borrow fromMerleau-Ponty to make this claim.MauriceMerleau-Ponty, “Part 1: The Body,” in Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Routledge, 1995). 5. Hari Singh Everest, letter to the editor, Sikh Sansar 1 (1972), 31. Everest moved from Pakistan to India when the country was partitioned after indepen- dence from Britain. He worked in India and applied for immigration to the United States in 1951. His documents are stored in the Pioneering Punjabis Digital Archive, University of California, Davis, https://pioneeringpunjabis. ucdavis.edu/people/professionals/hari-singh-everest (accessed 20 Jan. 2022). 6. See Karen Leonard, “Finding One’s Own Place: Asian Landscapes Re- visioned in Rural California,” in Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology, ed. Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997), 118–36. Using examples from the Caribbean, Amitav Ghosh too argues that marginalized immigrant Indians appropriate diasporic locations by using familiar place-names and landscape descriptions to claim ownership of these spaces. See Amitav Ghosh, “The Diaspora in Indian Cul- ture,” Public Culture 2 (Fall 1989), 73–78. 7. In addition to not having money or power, Sikh immigrants did not have legal permission to own land in California until 1956, when the passage of Proposition 13 officially repealed the Alien Land Law of 1913, which barred Indians and other Asians from owning property. Prior to that time, Asian im- migrants who settled in California and began to prosper in the state’s agricul- tural economy used white Americans as proxy owners for their farms and other properties. Records from that period include rare accounts of gurdwa- ras, or places of worship in Sikh communities. 8. According to John Brinckerhoff Jackson, “This has always been the com- mon or vernacular way of recognizing the unique quality of the community we live in. Sense of place is related to [our] sense of time.” John Brinckerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996), 160. 9.Michael Herzfeld, A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cre- tan Town (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991). 10. See Swati Chattopadhyay, “Ephemeral Architecture: Toward Radical Contingency,” in The Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contempo- rary Architecture, ed. Swati Chattopadhyay and Jeremy White (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2019), 138–60. 11. For a critique of this practice, see Dell Upton, “Architectural History or Landscape History?,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 4 (1991), 195–99. 12. Pierre Bourdieu,Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 6–7. 13.The importance of dance, movement, art, music, and culinary practices in the making of place is not commonly addressed in architectural histories, but historians, anthropologists, and ethnic studies scholars have examined such practices closely. See, for instance, George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); José E. Limón, Dancing with the
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