Map of the native town of Bombay : completed to 1855 by H. Conybeare.
URB 305/SAS 351/AAS 364/ARC 325: Race, Caste, and Space: Architectural History as Property History, Mondays 1:30pm-4:20pm
Prof. Sonali Dhanpal, Princeton Mellon Fellow
Architectural historians have “traditionally avoided the topic of race”[1] and asked even fewer questions about caste and its relationship to the built environment. Euro-American academics routinely provincialize caste as a subcontinental concern of South Asia — yet a growing body of scholarship is revealing the strategic codification of caste across the Anglophone world, spread through British and American imperial transoceanic flows, and showing how caste, like race, functions within ‘global’ geographies because of their naturalization. While recognizing that caste has key distinctions from race, this course will consider the intertwined histories of these two concepts, placing them within the history of architecture and urbanism by examining colonial and settler-colonial spatial practices and processes of property-making. In doing so, the course confronts architecture’s deep entanglement in property and capital, framing architecture’s “global” history as a history of land as property. Students will leave with an understanding of how modern property co-emerged with racial subjectivities — contextual assemblages of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship — and how architecture condenses these tensions, contradictions, disavowals, and betrayals of colonialism.
[1]Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) 1.
