ABOLITION ARCHITECTURE

This  seminar introduces students to histories of abolition through constructed environments and artistic, material, and spatial practices. We study abolition of slavery, prisons, and borders during a period from the eighteenth century to the present. Attending to the distinct social movements and discourses sparked by these very different abolitionist targets, we examine the political, ethical, and aesthetic intersections that emerge. 

We investigate these problems through architecture, landscapes, material culture, and art, studying primary works, secondary texts, and methods. The course emphasizes study through historical reasoning as well as analysis of sensorial and affective material. This multimodal approach is necessary in studying forms of injustice in order to comprehend unfreedom, a paradoxical concept that produces cognitive dissonance and counters liberal reason.

The course draws on architectural history as crucial to illuminating how place, space, design, and planning of built environments have enacted and archived people’s unfreedom, and relies on intersectional feminist and critical race frameworks to understand abolition as part of a tradition of emancipatory thought and teaching. We study practices and institutions that have produced and shaped enclosure and incarceration in contexts around the world, placing abolition in dialogue with the anticolonial. The course illuminates the roles that both reform and radical refusal have played in abolitionist struggles for spatial justice, and maintains attention to material, spatial, and aesthetic practices throughout.

This seminar has no prerequisites and all assignments are guided. Readings consider the formation of space, power, and knowledge together, in aesthetic and cultural analyses of the abolition of enslavement, incarceration, and border regimes. Students lead discussion, based on exercises in collective annotation of full books, including: Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration by Nicole Fleetwood; Witnessing Slavery: Art and Travel in the Age of Abolition by Sarah Thomas; and Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies, by Yến Lê Espiritu, Lan Duong, Ma Vang, Victor Bascara, Khatharya Um, Lila Sharif, and Nigel Hatton. These texts are contextualized in relation to other books and articles, study of works of art and architecture, visits to archives, and guest lectures. Each student produces