The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra

The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements
The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements (Routledge, 2024) by Joseph Godlewski examines the historical intersection of race and the built environment in what is now southeastern Nigeria. In the wake of the terror of the slave trade, colonization, and civil war, it sheds light on the ways a spatial culture marked by self-determination and exchange productively crafted sites of Black identity, prefiguring today’s free trade zones and neo-Biafran secessionist movements. As a tropical region of dense mangrove forests and serpentine creeks with a long history of decentralized political arrangements and small-scale impermanent building traditions, it presents the prospect of an expanded spatiotemporal imagination to grapple with contemporary forms of racial precarity, ecocide, and market logics. Organized as a series of changing spatial paradigms, it is a story animated by cartographic monsters, ghost worlds, and masquerade performances that unsettles simple analytic binaries and connects localized assemblies to global configurations of knowledge production. The book chronicles the generative places of resistance, creative adaptation, and self-invention that were possible despite unfathomable conflict and violence. Produced by a spectrum of human and nonhuman agents, these spaces of entanglement suggest friction, adhesion, and enclosure but also intimacy, mutual dependence, and fluidity. [1] As sites of exuberance and loss, wonder and exploitation, they forge platforms for dialogue and repair in a fractured world.

Critics’ reviews
“Employing architectural drawings, maps, and photography as analytical and documentary evidence of Calabar’s origins, it explores the city’s early trading through slavery to the present-day Tinapa free trade zone. A must-read for all interested in understanding Calabar and other coastal communities in West Africa… A tour de force.”

Ola Uduku, Head of School, Roscoe Chair of Architecture, University of Liverpool.

“This erudite text ruptures the framework of everything we know about architectural and spatial productions in West Africa from the early modern period to the present. Godlewski elucidates the systems of thought and cultural exchange involving Africans and Europeans central to the generation of cities like Old Calabar.”

Nnamdi Elleh, Head of School, School of Architecture and Planning, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa.

“Deftly written and conceptually ambitious, this book offers a richly layered account of the spatial and architectural history of coastal southeastern Nigeria. Godlewski gives us a dazzling new understanding of Africa’s Atlantic world by centering what he aptly calls ‘offshore’ architecture—including port cities, built shorelines, ships, and canoes.”

Prita Meier, Associate Professor of Art History, Department of Art History & The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU.

“Brave and insightful, this original scholarship contributes to our understanding of turn-of-the-19th-century Nigerian coastal architecture. That its beautifully written and drawn analyses are also inserted within the author’s making sense of the strangely silent dynamism of a millennial project like Tinapa makes the book a timely intervention for the present too.” 

Ikem Stanley Okoye, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Delaware.

“This well-researched book reconstructs the complex and dialogic histories of the Bight of Biafra. Crucially, Godlewski shows us how the effects of spatial conditions in different eras coexist in the contemporary built environment and continue to shape the material realities and urban imaginaries of the present.”

Cecilia L. Chu, Associate Professor, School of Architecture, Chinese University of Hong Kong.

“In an epic sweep Godlewski surefootedly engages with how a myriad of spaces were created in Old Calabar...Historians of architecture have not focused on this city despite its significance in the formation of modern Nigeria. Godlewski’s wonderful book fills that lacuna.”

Adedoyin Teriba, Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Architecture & Urbanism, Dartmouth College.

“This volume offers a tightly argued, incisive look into the core architectural spaces of the Bight of Biafra, framing them as sites of encounter and exchange. In doing so, it deconstructs established ideas of urban spaces as being socio-politically, culturally, and economically self-contained.”

Michelle M. Apotsos, Associate Professor of Art / Chair of Art History, Williams College.

“Based on an attentive investigation of a rich array of historical ethnographic records, the book challenges established narratives on West African built environments and exposes the interplay between architecture and modern processes of racialization… A compelling spatial history that illuminates cross-cultural exchanges, transnational hybridizations, and local adaptations.”

Elisa Dainese, Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology.

“The innovative methodology that Godlewski deploys to historicize transient built and unbuilt environments and their multifarious relationalities through five spatial paradigms would be instructive and of interest to scholars of colonial and postcolonial architecture and urbanism in other parts of the world.” 

Jiat-Hwee Chang, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore.

Notes: [1] On “Planetary Entanglement,” see Achille Mbembé, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (New York, NY: Columbia University, 2021), 7–41.