Mapping, Making, and Representing Colonial Spaces

LCA and Art History 621 (cross-listed)

The spatial legacy of colonialism continues to live with us in the present.  It plays a role in molding the postcolonial spaces of the future, both in former centers of colonial rule (such as London, Paris) and also in former colonies (such as India, Vietnam).  “Colonialism” is often used to describe a very specific type of cultural and material exploitation that accompanied the territorial expansion of Europe across much of the world over the last 400 years.  This graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar explores several important ways in which the landscape, architecture, and urban environment of these territories were mapped, made, and represented, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Our primary settings will be territories under British and/or French colonial rule.  Topics to be considered include: the naming, and documentation of newly colonized territories and its architecture; the making of colonial cities; the contestation of space through everyday practices; and representations of colonized populations.  Emulating the geographical spread of colonialism, theoretical and empirical analyses will travel across diverse disciplinary and spatial terrain, drawing on works in architectural and urban history, cultural studies, urban anthropology, and critical human geography.  Case studies include among other topics, the colonial restructuring of Cairo by French and British engineers; municipal surveillance and the contestation over space in colonial Singapore; the use of history by the British to develop an architecture of authority in colonial India; the South Asian diaspora in London; and claims made by aboriginal groups to recover their sacred spaces in contemporary Australia.