Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture

The Canadian Centre for Architecture recently launched a multidisciplinary research project on architecture’s complex developments in sub-Saharan African countries after independence. The architecture practice and discipline, along with academic institutions, archives, libraries, and museums, have been integral to what Valentin-Yves Mudimbe calls “the invention of Africa” by the West. The project therefore asks, first, how to understand architecture’s historical role in decolonization, neocolonialism, globalization, and their manifestations across the continent, at local and regional scales; and, second, how this understanding can challenge established methods and disciplinary conventions of architectural and urban studies. Beginning in October, 2019, with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the CCA will direct an eighteen-month period of research in collaboration with ten Mellon Researchers pursuing eight projects that seek to analyze and historicize the ways in which architecture manifests transformations in post-independence African countries. The Mellon Researchers’ projects move across actors, architectural typologies, key geographies, and urban developments that constitute architecture’s varied agencies in sub-Saharan Africa. Through workshops, public events, and collaborative forms of dissemination the Mellon Researchers will shape the future of architectural and urban scholarship on the continent by addressing urgent issues of anti-colonial pedagogy, sited forms of historiography, and a resurgence of decolonial archival practices. This presentation will share early findings from the group of Mellon Researchers which examine how decolonial archival practices of relevance to academic institutions, archives, libraries, and museums can come into being through the creation of digital platforms that reflect African-led forms of knowledge creation.