The Bartlett International Lectures: Continuity and Discontinuity in Colonial/Postcolonial Modernity

About

Speaker Nnamdi Elleh joins host Murray Fraser, as part of The Bartlett International Lectures Spring 2023 and PhD Conference. This year, the International Lectures return to an in-person format, with lectures taking place at the school's Bloomsbury campus, in the Christopher Ingold Auditorium, 22 Gordon Street, at 19:00 GMT on Wednesdays throughout the autumn and spring terms. Advance registration is not required unless specifically stated.

Abstract

Focusing on the Northern Cape Provincial Legislature Complex in Kimberley in South Africa, designed by Louis Ferreira Da Silva Architects and completed in 1998, this lecture explores nodes of spatial and ideological continuity and discontinuity in colonial and postcolonial centres of administration. It aims to understand how traditions, group and national identity are retrieved, asserted, and mediated in built forms that resonate and clash with ongoing debates about decolonisation, cultural expressions, language, and modernity.  
 
The lecture will suggest that the Northern Cape Provincial Legislature Complex is symptomatic of criticisms of the aesthetics of the architecture of decolonisation. Two questions that feature strongly in these criticisms are: ‘What does it mean to be modern and African?’, and ‘How might that modernity be expressed in postcolonial African architectural cultural experiences without defaulting to European/’Western’ conceptions of modernism and modernity’?  
 
In examining these questions, this talk argues that decolonisation should not focus only on spatial, cultural, and philosophical occupations of the African body and mind, but should also understand the continued colonisation of the whole project of the modern world – and that African’s contributions to modernity are not mere appendages to ‘Western’ or anyone else’s thinking, but the natural outcomes of emerging global experiences and cultural exchanges.  

Biography

Nnamdi Elleh, Ph.D., is Professor of Architecture, and the Head of the School of Architecture & Planning at the University of Witwatersrand (WITS), Johannesburg. He lectured at the University of Cincinnati from 2002 to 2017. His publications include 'African Architecture, Evolution and Transformation' (McGraw Hill, 1996); 'Architecture and Power in Africa' (Praeger, 2001), 'Reading the Architecture of the Underprivileged Classes' (2014), 'Architecture and Politics in Nigeria' (Routledge, 2017), and 'African Studies Keyword: Okà' (2022). His current research examines methods for thinking through complex concepts, theories, and thoughts in indigenous African languages for the purposes of expanding meanings of ideas in different disciplines of learning (https://www.wits.ac.za/soap/wits-vits/).

More information

• View the full schedule for The Bartlett International Lectures Spring 2023