Partitions, Borders, Camps

This seminar turns a lens on partitions, borders, and camps. Whereas these iconic forms have been studied most often through legal, policy, or social science lenses, we will consider them conceptually, aesthetically, and historically as complex practices of architectural formmaking in the long twentieth century. The partition, the border, and the camp can each be understood as a legal and territorial concept, a symbolic and aesthetic marker of violent land demarcation, a material environment, and an intersection of spatial practices. Through careful readings and discussion, we will look closely at each as an illumination of irreducible entanglements between politics and aesthetics, and sensible expressions of colonial practices that persist in the built environment.

In this course, students examine histories of partitions from Ireland to Somalia to Pakistan, and their reification as borders. Understanding partition as a concept and a process rather than a determinate end, the course examines histories of built environments that create the illusion of determinacy by reinforcing territorial markers: whether through large intentional projects, for example, the construction of a new state capital at Chandigarh in India, or unstated means, for example, the responsive humanitarian or detention architectures of camps at borders in Palestine and East Africa. The course will examine the robust discourse on the materialities of borders, thinking beyond the construction of walls to sometimes obscured forms of spatial anchoring across divides, for example, mediatic traversals, animal crossings, or the work of crowds. The course examines histories of camps, from the concentration technologies used during the Spanish American War in Cuba and the Boer War in South Africa in the nineteenth century to twenty-first century ephemeral environments enabling people to crystallize forms of dissidence, whether at Wall street in New York or Shaheen Bagh in Delhi. We analyze processes by which the refugee camp enclosure racializes, genders, sexualizes, and controls bodies, precipitating a self-partitioning by asylum seekers in the performance of vulnerability. Although the constructed environments of camps serve as repositories of power, regardless of their purpose (and regardless of their orientation toward control or care—for example, whether made to confine migrants or to shelter refugees), they are iconic for their impermanence, and it is precisely their partial persistence that establishes them as ep