I wish to credit and extend a hand to fellow participants in the University of Pennsylvania symposium, “Structural Instabilities: History, Environment, and Risk in Architecture,” and other colleagues who form the readership for this dossier of essays, especially those who have worked on feminist histories or related questions of engaging radical forms of collaboration in scholarship.
The arguments in this essay stem from my research and twinned concern for feminist histories and instabilities in architectural theory, however, the conceptualization of “feminist architectural histories of migration” and the text in this paragraph and the next draw from a collaboration with Rachel Lee. Each of us works extensively on migration and mobility and we began collaborating in 2014. See: “On Margins: Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration,” a dossier directed by Rachel Lee and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, in Architecture Beyond Europe, forthcoming 2019, ➝; Siddiqi and Lee, “A Woman’s Situation: Transnational Mobility and Gendered Practice,” European Architectural History Network co-chaired session, 2018, with field note in preparation for Architectural Histories; Lee, “Women and Gender in Architecture and Urban Design,” unpublished special interest group report, European Architectural History Network, 2018; Siddiqi, “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration,” paper for “Structural Instabilities: History, Environment, and Risk in Architecture” symposium, University of Pennsylvania, 2018; Lee and Siddiqi, “Extreme Mobility, Local Practice,” paper for “AA Women and Architecture in Context 1917-2017” conference, Architectural Association XX 100, 2017; Lee, “A Transnational Assemblage,” in AA Women in Architecture, 1917-2017, eds. Elizabeth Darling and Lynne Walker (London: AA Press, 2017): 108–28; Siddiqi and Lee, “Women on the Edge: Mobility and Regionalism from the Margins,” European Association for Urban History co-chaired session, 2016. See also Lee, Diane Barbé, Anne-Katrin Fenk, and Philipp Misselwitz, eds., Things Don’t Really Exist Until You Give Them a Name: Unpacking Urban Heritage (Dar es Salaam: Mkuki na Nyota, 2017), with essay by Siddiqi, “A Shadow Heritage of the Humanitarian Colony: Dadaab’s Foreclosure of the Urban Historical,” 100-105.
While there is a broad literature to cite, the following interventions represent collaborative historiographic practices, whose articulated aims in the relationship between theory, historiography, and practice have informed the “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” project. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden, eds., Gender Space Architecture: an interdisciplinary introduction (London: Routledge, 2000). Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, eds., Negotiating Domesticity: spatial productions of gender in modern architecture (New York: Routledge, 2005). Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting, eds., Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies (London; New York: Routledge, 2017). Jane Rendell, “Chapter 4: Tendencies and Trajectories: Feminist Approaches in Architecture,” in The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, ed. C. Greig Crysler, Stephen Cairns, and Hilde Heynen (London: SAGE, 2012). Karin Reisinger and Meike Schalk, eds., “Becoming a Feminist Architect,” Field: 7:1 (2017); “Styles of Queer Feminist Practices and Objects,” Architecture and Culture 5:3 (2017). Justine Clark, Naomi Stead, Karen Burns, Sandra Kaji O'Grady, Julie Willis, Amanda Roan, and Gill Matthewson, Parlour: women, equity, architecture (2012), ➝. Lilian Chee, Barbara Penner, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, and Naomi Stead, eds., Situating Domesticities, edited volume in preparation. Isabelle Doucet and Hélène Frichot, eds., “Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated perspectives on architecture and the city,” Architectural Theory Review 22:1 (2018). Ana María León, Tessa Paneth-Pollak, Olga Touloumi, and Martina Tanga, “Contested Spaces: Colony, Plantation, School, Prison, Kitchen, Closet,” Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative lecture module, ➝. Rosalyn Deutsche, Aruna D’Souza, Miwon Kwon, Ulrike Müller, Mignon Nixon, and Senam Okudzeto, “Feminist Time: A Conversation,” Grey Room 31 (Spring 2008): 32–67. Léopold Lambert, ed., The Funambulist 13, “Queers, Feminists & Interiors.” “Women in Architecture” series, Places, ➝. “Architectural Historiography and Fourth Wave Feminism,” Architectural Histories special collection, forthcoming. Now What?! Advocacy, Activism, and Alliances in American Architecture since 1968, exhibition curated by ArchiteXX (Lori Brown, Andrea Merrett, Sarah Rafson, and Roberta Washington), Pratt Institute, May 24–July 6, 2018. African Mobilities: This Is Not a Refugee Camp Exhibition, exhibition curated by Mpho Matsipa, Architekturmuseum der TU München, April 26–August 19, 2018, ➝. Workaround—Women, Design, Action, exhibition curated by Kate Rhodes, Fleur Watson, and Naomi Stead, RMIT University, July 25–August 11, 2018, ➝. See also curation projects by Jackfruit Research & Design, ➝, for example: Mutable: Ceramic and Clay Art in India since 1947, exhibition curated by Sindhura D. M. and Annapurna Garimella / Jackfruit Research & Design, Piramal Museum of Art, Mumbai, October 13, 2017–January 15, 2018; Preview of Works by Ramesh Pithiya, exhibition curated by Jackfruit Research & Design, Milind Nayak’s studio, Bangalore, May 26–30, 2006, with Art of the Matter: A Series on Art and Literature, “1: Queerness,” by Ruchika Chanana, Kimaaya.
The understanding of migration and mobility as distinct terms is central to the “Feminist Architectural Histories of Migration” project, which in future publications will attend to aspects that relate or distinguish them, in part, through analysis of the forms and figures in this paragraph.
I have been developing these theorizations in two strands. One is an architectural and territorial history of colonialism and humanitarianism in East Africa, based in part on the gendered work of forced migrants within and beyond modes of emergency, as commissioners, designers, and fabricators of the constructed environments of camps. The other is on modernist cultural production in imperial South Asia, its arts and crafts inflections, and its preoccupations with heritage, using as a starting point the migratory architectural career of Minnette de Silva (1930s-1990s). These projects draw empirically from related Indian Ocean histories of modernity and architectural modernism, but are also historiographically and theoretically linked, as feminist architectural histories of migration.
This history was developed in two symposia, “The Housing Question,” Nomad Seminar in Historiography, organized by Juliana Maxim and Can Bilsel at the University of San Diego in 2015, and “Situating Domesticities in Architecture,” organized by Lilian Chee, Simone Chung, and Jessica Cook at the National University of Singapore in 2017. Aspects of it are being developed for publications arising from each.
This study is culled from eight years of research I conducted in state, academic, cultural, and humanitarian archives, as well as individual and group interviews with approximately five hundred refugees, aid workers, officials, and architects in camps and elsewhere, some on behalf of the Women’s Refugee Commission for the report Preventing Gender-based Violence, Building Livelihoods: Guidance and Tools for Improved Programming, ➝. This paper draws from narrations by Shamso Abdullahi Farah during a day spent with her. Norwegian Refugee Council staff member Hashim Keinan provided real-time translation from Somali to English as we walked around Farah’s plot and examined the buildings she and her family members built. I directed my questions to Farah, Keinan translated, and Farah responded directly to me. In Keinan’s translation, he occasionally responded directly to my questions and referred to Farah in the third person. I have made allowances for his interpretation in mine. Shamso Abdullahi Farah, interview with author and Bethany Young, on behalf of the Women’s Refugee Commission, translation and interpretation by Hashim Keinan, 2011.
Antonio Gramsci, et. al., Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 5–14.
Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic subjects: embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Hilde Heynen, “Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradictions,” Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture (London; New York: Routledge, 2005): 22. Chantal Mouffe, “For a Politics of Nomadic Identity,” in George Robertson, Melinda Mash, Lisa Tickner, Jon Bird, et. al., eds., Travellers’ Tales: Narratives of Home and Displacement (London; Routledge, 1994): 105-113.
Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
See Alexander Weheliye’s critique of the effacement of racialized constructions of the category of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Architecting the Border: The Hut and the Frontier at Work in East Africa.” The Funambulist 10 (2017).
Felicity D. Scott, Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity / Architectures of Counterinsurgency (New York: Zone Books, 2016): 442.
The complexities alluded to here will be addressed in Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Humanitarian Homemaker / Emergency Subject,” Architecture and the Housing Question, eds. Juliana Maxim and Can Bilsel (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2019).
Anonymous, interview by author, on behalf of the Women’s Refugee Commission, 2011.
As multiple interviews indicated, shelter and settlements is one of the NRC’s well-known major areas of expertise and its own stated core competence; see ➝.
NRC Shelter Adviser, interview by author, 2012.
Former NRC incentive worker, multiple interviews by author, 2012–2014.
Interviews with Farah, other refugees, and aid workers who worked with NRC attested to this. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Architecture Culture, Humanitarian Expertise: From the Tropics to Shelter, 1953-1993,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 76.3 (September 2017), 367–384. See also Farhan Karim, ed., The Routledge Companion to Architecture and Social Engagement (New York: Routledge, 2018); Helen Gyger, Improvised Cities: Architecture, Urbanization, and Innovation in Peru (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming 2018); M. Ijlal Muzaffar, “The Periphery Within: Modern Architecture and the Making of the Third World,” Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2007.
This argument builds on the reorienting and recuperative work already performed by a range of subaltern and postcolonial studies projects. Think of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak exposing the “alien agent of ‘true’ history in native space” and finding the embodiment and historical intervention of the Rani of Sirmur in a mere two acts recorded by the East India Company (her payment of a pension to a great-aunt and her declaration to perform sati). Consider Prathama Banerjee’s analysis of a possible subject position and discursive field for the indigenous adivasi, long constituted through colonial and national structures as “history-less” people inhabiting “the condition of being always already archaic and yet indelibly presentist.” Hear also, as Annapurna Garimella marshals related interrogations toward a curatorial field failing to produce discursive parity between Anglophone and vernacular art, asking, “What does the folk or tribal artist, the vernacular artist, do by making and innovating through art?...Generating an even more indigenous contemporary, or an alternative engagement with the global? Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24:3 (October 1985), 267. Prathama Banerjee, “Writing the Adivasi: Some historiographical notes,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 53:1 (2016), 16. Annapurna Garimella, “The Vernacular Contemporary,” paper presented in the Melbourne Art Fair 2012 Lecture and Forums, ➝.
Peg Rawes and Douglas Spencer, “Material and Rational Feminisms,” in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies, eds. Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson, and Helen Runting (London: Routledge, 2017).
Lourde’s often cited call to order must be understood in its historical specificity and through the positionality of sexuality, gender, and race that situated her words. Her conceptualization of radical feminism nevertheless sharpens this reflection on Farah’s intersections with architecture and power. Audre Lourde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Audre Lourde (with introduction by Alice Walker), The Audre Lorde Compendium: Essays, Speeches and Journals (London: Harper Collins, 1996). See also Aqdas Aftab, “Appropriating Audre: On the Need to Locate the Oppressor within Us,” Bitch Media, February 22, 2017, ➝.
I am grateful to Sophie Debiasi Hochhäusl, a co-organizer of “Structural Instabilities,” for multiple discussions which clarified this thinking, particularly those she convened in 2017 and 2018 at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, as well as others related to her papers on the intellectual practices of Margarete Schütte-Lihotsky, including one for Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and Rachel Lee, “A Woman’s Situation: Transnational Mobility and Gendered Practice,” European Architectural History Network co-chaired session, 2018. I am also grateful to Annapurna Garimella for several discussions in 2018 on the intellectual work performed through craft (in all senses of the word), the construction of spaces of complexity, and the strengthening of communities of care for rigorous acts of reading, writing, and thought.
Some aspects of this were addressed in Andrew Herscher and Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, “Spatial Violence,” Architectural Theory Review 19:3 (December 2014), 269–277. While some academic fields have attempted to take on the problem of epistemic violence, for example, those concerned with indigenous people’s politics, architectural history as currently configured primarily in art historical and architecture school contexts has not yet contributed robustly to this discussion (with notable exceptions in recent initiatives to decolonize knowledge production around architecture, art, and aesthetics).
Dipesh Chakrabarty and Ian Pollock, “The knowledge we value: Dipesh Chakrabarty talks the contentious politics of knowledge production,” The Familiar Strange podcast, episode 7, February 4, 2018, ➝.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
Frantz Fanon (with introduction by Jean-Paul Sartre), Les Damnés de la Terre (Paris: Éditions Maspero, 1961). Sylvia Winter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 3 (Fall 2003): 261–262. For Sylvia Winter, “ethnoclass Man” stands in as the universal subject in discourses on humanity—for her, a Western bourgeois conception “which overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself.” Sylvia Winter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” The New Centennial Review, Volume 3, Number 3 (Fall 2003): 260.
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, “The General Antagonism: An Interview with Stevphen Shukaitis,” in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe; New York; Port Watson: Minor Compositions, 2013): 106.