Paul Strand's Ghana and photography after colonialism

This article reclaims Paul Strand’s book Ghana: An African Portrait (published in the year of his death,1976) as a conflicted attempt to represent postcolonial nationhood. Comparisons with Richard Wright’s Black Power (1954) are used to open up the central problem of how to represent a post-colonial state in the making while also dealing with the author/photographer’s own difference from the subjects and subjectivities depicted. This is explored through the thematic of portraiture, of looking and being looked at, particularly in how to portray the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah and the relationship between leader and post-colonial citizen

Imperial Modernism

Architectural Modernism related in complex ways to the late colonial context of the mid-twentieth century. This chapter explores the opportunities and visions invested in Modernism by both colonizers and the colonized, while relating these to the instrumental and exclusionary logic that gave Modernism such a powerful role within both the imperial apparatus and its succeeding post-colonial regimes. The relationship of Modernism and empire is thus understood in ways that open up or re-cast each other, especially in terms of metropolis and colony. It is in this spirit that the workings of the avantgarde, of official Modernism, of a climatically functional architecture for the tropics, of the vernacular, and of Modernism’s continuation after empire, are all treated

Modern architecture and the end of empire

Book synopsis: This title was first published in 2003: Modernist architecture claimed to be the 'international style' but the relationship between modernism and the new dispositions of nations and nationalities which have succeeded the old European empires remains obscure. In this, the first book to examine the interactions between modern architecture, imperialism and post-imperialism, Mark Crinson looks at the architecture of the last years of the British Empire, and during its prolonged dissolution and aftermath. Taking a number of case studies from Britain, Ghana, Hong Kong, Iran, India and Malaysia, he investigates the ambitions of the people who commissioned the buildings, the training and role of architects, and the interaction of the architecture and its changing social and cultural contexts. This book raises questions about the nature of modernism and its roles that look far beyond empire and towards the post-imperial

'My Village': organising the world and structuring the colonial architectural archive

The problems of archives accumulated under colonialism are now well known. This paper uses aspects of the Percy Johnson-Marshall Collection at the University of Edinburgh to reflect on how to interpret the archive not only through what it records, or the relation between what survives and what does not, but in terms of alternative ways of understanding the archive’s conceptual structure. As an influential post-Second World War architect and planner, active in Britain and in international organisations, Percy Johnson-Marshall’s (1915–1993) attitudes towards the work of the welfare state were significantly formed by his colonial background and his reactions against that background. This article draws out the deeper meanings of his archive by deploying A. J. Greimas’ ‘semiotic square’, as interpreted by Fredric Jameson. Explaining it first via the legal thriller Dark Waters (2019), which has an archive as its narrative pivot, the semiotic square is then used to map the conceptual structure of the Johnson-Marshall Collection. Finally, the article focusses on ‘My Village’, a set of papers in the collec- tion documenting a pedagogic project preparing Indian soldiers to reform their villages following wartime service. Here themes of organis- ation and disorganisation (good and bad villages) are specific articula- tions of the archive’s epistemology while the idea of collectivity is problematically related to them

Rebuilding Babel: modern architecture and Internationalism

Book synopsis Much of modernist architecture was inspired by the emergence of internationalism: the ethics and politics of world peace, justice and unity through global collaboration. Mark Crinson here shows how the ideals represented by the Tower of Babel - built, so the story goes, by people united by one language - were effectively adapted by internationalist architecture, its styles and practices, in the modern period. Focusing particularly on the points of convergence between modernist and internationalist trends in the 1920s, and again in the immediate post-war years, he underlines how such architecture utilised the themes of a cooperative community of builders and a common language of forms.The 'International Style' was one manifestation of this new way of thinking, but Crinson shows how the aims of modernist architecture frequently engaged with the substance of an internationalist mindset in addition to sharing surface similarities. Bringing together the visionaries of internationalist projects - including Le Corbusier, Bruno Taut, Berthold Lubetkin, Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe - Crinson interweaves ideas of evolution, ecology, utopia, regionalism, socialism, free trade, and anti-colonialism to reveal the possibilities heralded by modernist architecture. Furthermore, he re-connects pivotal figures in architecture with a cast of polymath internationalists such as Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, Julian Huxley, Rabindranath Tagore and H. G. Wells, to provide a richly detailed socio-cultural framework. This is a book crafted for students and scholars of architecture and art theory, as well as for those interested in the history of twentieth-century optimism about the world and its architecture

Empire building: Orientalism and Victorian architecture

Book synopsis: The colonial architecture of the nineteenth century has much to tell us of the history of colonialism and cultural exchange. Yet, these buildings can be read in many ways. Do they stand as witnesses to the rapacity and self-delusion of empire? Are they monuments to a world of lost glory and forgotten convictions? Do they reveal battles won by indigenous cultures and styles? Or do they simply represent an architectural style made absurdly incongruous in relocation? Empire Building is a study of how and why Western architecture was exported to the Middle East and how Islamic and Byzantine architectural ideas and styles impacted on the West. The book explores how far racial theory and political and religious agendas guided British architects (and how such ideas were resisted when applied), and how Eastern ideas came to influence the West, through writers such as Ruskin and buildings such as the Crystal Palace. Beautifully written and lavishly illustrated, Empire Building takes the reader on an extraordinary postcolonial journey, backwards and forwards, into the heart and to the edge of empire