The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements (Routledge Research in Architectural History)

The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements (Routledge Research in Architectural History)

The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra challenges linear assumptions about agency, progress, and domination in colonial and postcolonial cities, adding an important sub‑Saharan case study to existing scholarship on globalization and modernity. Intersected by small creeks, rivulets, and dotted with mangrove swamps, the Bight of Biafra has a long history of decentralized political arrangements and intricate trading networks predating the emergence of the Atlantic world. While indigenous merchants in the region were active participants in the transatlantic slave trading system, they creatively resisted European settlement and maintained indigenous sovereignty until the middle of the nineteenth century. Since few built artifacts still exist, this study draws from a close reading of written sources―travelers’ accounts, slave traders’ diaries, missionary memoirs, colonial records, and oral histories―as well as contemporary fieldwork to trace transformations in the region’s built environment from the sixteenth century to today. With each chapter focusing on a particular spatial paradigm in this dynamic process, this book uncovers the manifold and inventive ways in which actors strategically adapted the built environment to adjust to changing cultural and economic circumstances. In parallel, it highlights the ways that these spaces were rhetorically constructed and exploited by foreign observers and local agents. Enmeshed in the history of slavery, colonialism, and the modern construction of race, the spatial dynamics of the Biafran region have not been geographically delimited. The central thesis of this volume is that these spaces of entanglement have been productive sites of Black identity formation involving competing and overlapping interests, occupying multiple positions and temporalities, and ensnaring real, imagined, and sometimes contradictory aims. This book will be of interest to researchers and students of architecture, architectural history, urban geography, African studies, and Atlantic studies. This book was awarded the Cecil B. Currey Book Award by the Association for Global South Studies (AGSS) and Honorable Mention for the 2025 Anthony Leeds Prize in Urban Anthropology by the Critical Urban Anthropology Association (CUAA). “This masterful exploration of Nigerian slave port architecture, urbanism, and lived experience enriches and transforms our understanding of built environment entanglements within the history, theory, and agency of Biafran social upheaval. A uniquely creative and transdisciplinary book, the well-selected and wonderfully diverse illustrations ground and unify the whole.” Suzanne Preston Blier , Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts, Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University. “Outstanding… Theoretically capacious… The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements i s a signal contribution to our understanding of how we might think about space, architecture and urbanism in the post-colony and a pathbreaking contribution to the rich and sophisticated literature on the Biafran region. A tour de force .” Michael Watts , Professor Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley, African Geographical Review “The book is a model of how to do a history of the architecture of the Global South outside established institutional models and paradigms. Working across disciplinary fields and with a capacious archive, Joseph Godlewski’s work stands out for its attention to the multiplicity of voices, discourses, theories, and practices that emerged out of the spaces of enslavement.” Simon Gikandi , Class of 1943 University Professor of English, Princeton University. “Masterpiece… It brings a paradigm shift that challenges the mainstream or popular conception of African architecture as being insular or static, incapable of evolving... Decolonizes the urban history of Africa, thus enabling the Bight of Biafra’s architectural evolution to be understood as both a product and a participant in broader historical processes.” Toyin Falola , Professor, Jacob & Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Texas at Austin. “The book makes compelling and innovative arguments that are thought provoking, insightful, and intellectually stimulating. Even more refreshing are its enthralling ethnographic details, which immerse the reader in the everyday history and lived experiences of the people of Old and modern Calabar.” Omolade Adunbi , Professor of Anthropology and Afroamerican and African Studies and Director of the African Studies Center at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. “This wonderful book issues important challenges to architectural history, looking beyond bland designations of neoliberal form to reveal their connections to historical enclaving-built practices. It explores analytical approaches that trace ‘nested, charged’ vernacular spaces as they spool across global transversals, m