The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field.
By Joseph Godlewski
I was trained to be suspicious of origins. The search for metaphysical starting points has always seemed haunted by romantic essentialist beliefs and fraught with contradictions, errors, and contested claims. That was certainly the case when I endeavored to write an urban history of the region known today as southeastern Nigeria. In a postcolonial nation-state comprising over 300 ethnolinguistic groups, the task of assigning a particular geography a singular cultural coherence ultimately proved elusive.
My recent book, The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements (Routledge, 2024), sheds light on this complexity, focusing on the small-scale, decentralized urban configurations of the West African coast near the Nigeria-Cameroon border. It uncovers how novel spatial practices in the region acted as productive sites for Black identity formation. These were spaces of resistance, and generative places of intermixture, creative adaptation, and self-invention. The book examines the historical intersection of race and the built environment from the early modern period to the present.
Part of writing this history involved cataloguing the diversity of conflicting foundational myths in the region, present in both oral histories and archival sources. This is partly why, when people asked what sparked my interest in the architecture and urban history of this part of the world, I resisted giving a singular answer. There were many reasons, not just one, and I did not have a clever origin story to tell. Nonetheless, the question persisted.
My research in Nigeria brought me in contact with a sprawling cast of personalties: teachers and students, preachers and sex workers, archivists and bartenders, choir members and cab drivers. One group of people I conversed with regularly were area boys, or local youth gang members. One day in Calabar in 2010, seated in a white plastic patio chair, drinking palm wine, a popular alcoholic beverage in the region, with a group of area boys I found myself at a loss with a similar question: What brought me here, again? Now that the book is complete, I am even more skeptical of origin stories but can share insights about how the ideas evolved during the research. Rather than pinpointing a “beginning,” highlighting moments when the research questions and implications shifted feels more productive. I will briefly outline three such moments here.
One pivotal moment in the project took place nearly twenty-five years ago at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Rem Koolhaas, principal architect of the world-renowned Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), urban theorist, and Harvard professor was leading the Project on the City research studio. In the spring of 2000, he was publicly presenting their findings of the Lagos, Nigeria research at the school. I had recently completed my undergraduate degree in architecture and Koolhaas’s star power drew me to the event. The presentation featured large-format aerial photographs and bold proclamations about “self-organizing” urbanism and a city with “no archives.” At the time, I knew little about Nigeria or urbanism in the Global South, so while intrigued by the scope of the work, I was unconvinced by its conclusions.
When I went to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, I sought to move beyond the Euro-American biases ingrained in my undergraduate architectural education and understand the dynamics of cities like Lagos. During my time there, I immersed myself in the study of history, cultural geography, and city planning. The work of Spiro Kostof and J.B. Jackson, who had left an imprint on the faculty and curriculum, influenced me. Their books and essays opened new ways of understanding urban landscapes and reshaped how I taught and understood cities. However, as transformative as their approaches were, they felt inadequate to address the scale and complexity of the issues in my project. For that, I turned to my advisor, feminist postcolonial urban theorist Ananya Roy. One aim of my research was to challenge apocalyptic framings of African cities and provide a grounded and informed account of the urban landscape. The book endeavors to tell the story of people creatively forging building traditions and spatial practices amid tremendous violence and constraint.
A second moment of reckoning came during my fieldwork in southeastern Nigeria and Calabar. My firsthand experience with the built environment and immersion in the social and material realities of the region challenged what I had studied from afar. As an architectural and urban historian, I was interested in the vernacular buildings and compound dwellings that seemed to shape so much of the city’s past. However, the people I interviewed in Nigeria prompted me to ask different questions. They urged me to reframe my priorities and situate myself in my work.
One day, at the Old Residency Museum library in Calabar, after I had explained the significance of local vernacular walled compounds to a group of scholars and students, a museum employee asked me bluntly, “What’s all this business about compounds?” She laughed. “Why are you so concerned with Nigerian compounds? Doesn’t Kim Kardashian live on a compound?” I paused. Having lived without television for the previous few years, I did not know the answer to her humorous question. She had observed this while watching Keeping Up with the Kardashians at her home, on a compound, on the outskirts of Calabar. Later, I found myself researching the fact that, indeed, the Kardashians live on a sprawling compound in Beverly Hills. These moments guided my analysis and helped me see contemporary spaces in southeastern Nigeria as part of a broader global urban history. During my time in Calabar, generous informants opened their cars, homes, and minds to me. Through them, I experienced the city’s remote corners and labyrinthine streets. Deliberation, wonder, awe, and laughter marked my time there and my associations in Nigeria have indelibly changed how I see cities and shaped the findings in the book.
Years later, just when the book had the feel of a “finished” product, the project underwent yet another transformation. In the spring of 2020, I was preparing my book proposal for prospective publishers. It was, in my estimation, a strong proposal that clearly outlined the book’s aims and contributions to scholarship. “You should publish this work” was the general message, and it likely would have secured a contract. But then, the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic delayed everything. As the world shut down, I found myself distracted, juggling Google Meets with my five-year-old’s kindergarten class and my two-year-old’s sleep schedule. I shelved the proposal indefinitely. At the same time, the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, and global protests underscored the need for critical reflection on Black culture’s multifaceted contributions. When I returned to the proposal over a year later, the urgency of the project had shifted. “You must publish this work” became the revised message.
I do not draw attention to this as an opportunist hawking books, but as someone who realized that the world had changed around me. What was at stake in the work had fundamentally shifted. Whole sections of the manuscript now read differently and required reimagining. The 2020 publication of Race and Modern Architecture (University of Pittsburgh, 2020) edited by Mabel O. Wilson, Charles L. Davis, and Irene Cheng further demanded that historians take account of the whiteness central to the Enlightenment’s universal mythologies. Paired with Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason (Duke University, 2017), it became necessary to connect my work’s findings to the discourse that emerged in its wake.
The end-product is a book that has had many lives and benefited from the insights of an inspiring cast of scholars and informants. The origins are as varied as those voices. While it is not a perfect study, it is a modest attempt to envision a more inclusive spatiotemporal imagination, one cognizant of the epistemic violence of the past. My hope is that it provokes conversations about our urban histories, how we live, and our relationship with the land. It is a story of reckoning and healing in a fractured world.
Joseph Godlewski is an accomplished scholar and educator known for his innovative contributions to architectural history, theory, and cultural landscape studies. At Syracuse he is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Senior Research Associate at the Maxwell African Scholars Union. His research employs close readings of textual and material culture to reveal the lived experiences of historically marginalized communities.
