1st Edition
The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra Spatial Entanglements
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.
1. Compound 2. Masquerade 3. Offshore 4. Enclave 5. Zone 6. Spaces of Entanglement
Biography
Joseph Godlewski is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Senior Research Associate at the Maxwell African Scholars Union at Syracuse University. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley. His writing has been featured in various forums, including The Plan Journal, Architecture Research Quarterly, e‑flux, CLOG, MONU, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, and the book Theory’s Curriculum (2020). His textbook, Introduction to Architecture: Global Disciplinary Knowledge, seeks to expand the repertoire of conventional architectural theory anthologies. Joseph is a contributing member of the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC).
“Employing architectural drawings, maps, and photography as analytical and documentary evidence of Calabar’s origins, it explores the city’s 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 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 Africa’s Atlantic world by centering what he aptly calls ‘offshore’ architecture—including 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 author’s 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. Godlewski’s 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
