Anticolonial Commitments

Date
28 November 2019

Time
6.30 PM

The processes of historicising imagined and built environments from around the world are contingent on the sources that scholars draw upon, the languages that they speak, their inherited and accumulated backgrounds, and on their resources. To dismantle the colonial syndrome is to question the nature of the materials employed to construct these narratives, as well as the linguistic skills and cultural values of the interpreter of these documents and artefacts. The interrogation of the interpreter, the why, how, and what is being interpreted is essential to the examination of the fabrication of histories and theories of architecture, their meanings, implications, and impacts. These written and unwritten protocols shape the inscription, transcription, production, and consumption of these constructs, and encourage or reinforce an intellectual domination, replication, or ignorance. The lecture questions these processes and proposes two attitudes that counter and undo French colonial tendencies, beliefs, and power.

Samia Henni is an Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at the Department of Architecture, College of Architecture, Art and Planning, Cornell University. She is the author of the award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (2017), the editor of War Zones: gta papers 2 (2018), and the curator of Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (2017–19). She received her Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture (with distinction) from ETH Zurich. She taught at Princeton University, ETH Zurich, and Geneva University of Art and Design.