El. knyga: Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements

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.

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 Godlewskis 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.

This work particularly stands out as 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 Biafras 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, making potent and sustained use of a rubric of entanglement.

Sarah Nuttall, Research Professor at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa.

Cities, particularly turbulent African cities, must continuously respond to mediating the need to belong to whatever global order is on hand, attempt to shape the composition of that order but also act as if separate from it. How this is done in the confluence of the material and political is the substantial and brilliant contribution of this book.

AbdouMaliq Simone, Senior Professorial Fellow Emeritus at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield.

Clear, readable, and rewarding a vivid picture of a relatively unknown place. Hopefully it will influence architectural scholarship on other places worthy of similar levels of attention.

John Hill, A Weekly Dose of Architecture Books, Book of the Week.

Godlewski reveals the complexities embedded in the simplest structures. Ultimately, his close attention to the social production of Biafran space in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries enriches his readingand our understandingof spatial politics in the contemporary moment. In an important sense, it offers a timely reminder that history matters.

Abigail A. Van Slyck, Dayton Professor Emerita of Art History and Architectural Studies, Connecticut College.

In his meticulously researched and valuably reflexive monograph, Joseph Godlewski amply demonstrates the intricate entanglement of ideas, people and things that have given rise to the varied landscapes of the Calabar region past and present. A superbly erudite monograph which will surely be recognised as a major contribution to architectural history, landscape research and African studies.

Hugh Clout, Landscape History: Journal of the Society for Landscape Studies

Employing architectural drawings, maps, and photography as analytical and documentary evidence of Calabars origins, it explores the citys 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 the 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 Africas Atlantic world by centering what he aptly calls offshore architectureincluding 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 authors 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. Godlewskis 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