Race &

Our guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. This episode discussed Indigenous thinking on infrastructure and architecture as sites for historical consciousness and contemporary creative practice in North America. 

Our guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. This episode discussed structuring cultural institutions and critical communities of black-brown solidarity in the African and South Asian diasporas of Nairobi and New York.

Show notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

In this episode, we take a trip to Wakanda, the fictional country in Marvel’s Black Panther, and explore and analyze the speculative architecture through a dual-lens of Afrofuturism and settler colonialism. What can we learn about architecture from Wakanda? And how can Black Panther learn from the critiques of the series' first installment?

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

Porches, their origin in the United States as a space constructed by and for the Black body, has become a key architectural space fundamental to Black culture as a space for exchange, storytelling and comfort. The porch, as a typology, often linked to the shotgun house, through its image making, produces a symbol for Black Identity in the United States. It therefore subverts the settler colonialist strategies and regimes of exclusion and the history of producing spaces around whiteness. By looking at the construction of these liminal spaces produced at the boundary between the private dwelling and the public sphere, we might better understand how the manifestation of Black culture is inherently tied to physical architectural spaces.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, published in 1987-1989 and republished in 2000 as Lilith’s Brood, follows the generational struggle of humanity against the alien race called the Oankali. Through an analysis of the events of the book, this podcast will situate the trilogy as a precursor to Afrofuturism within a context of settler colonialism. Through our conversation we will briefly delve into: how settler-colonialism has historically approached indigeneity; feminist models of resistance; race and representation; and the language settler colonialism uses to categorize architecture.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

In this podcast, we examine Little Tokyo in Los Angeles in the 1940s during and after Japanese American internment, its brief transformation into a prominent center of black life called Bronzeville, and the role of whiteness in the formation and subjugation of non-white spaces. By examining general understandings of “ethnic landscapes” alongside the history of racialized spaces like ‘ghettoes,’ we seek to uncover overlooked histories latent within them that reveal racial dynamics still relevant today.

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

Public transportation systems operating within American cities are highly racialized. By tying together first-hand accounts, news stories, and a range of data from studies in different disciplines, with an emphasis on conditions in Los Angeles, we aim to show how the country’s systems of capital and infrastructure are deeply entwined and organized to make people of color feel invisible and unwelcome as they navigate through space. At both macro and micro levels, these networks reinforce segregation and the policing of bodies, imposing damaging and deliberate impediments on the freedom and agency of people of color. It is clear, when looking at investment decisions and service plans, that funding and effective routes are steered away from communities of color toward vanity projects for white people. Transportation systems may not necessarily seem to fit into the traditional definition of architecture, but they are indisputably a part of the physical environment. As such, they play an important role in providing – or limiting – access to other architectures of society, whether those places be for work, domesticity, or leisure. Again, though, this infrastructure is in and of itself a site of racialized power dynamics, a direct mode for industries and the government to filter, control, and corral people of color. Studying transportation networks is a way to explore the spatial practices of people, to understand how settler colonialism and other socioeconomic dynamics condition life for disenfranchised populations, and to see how space and material can be used to keep people apart and assert who belongs where.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

In our previous episode, our investigation on Seneca Village led us to consider the erasure of black urban spaces and settlements. In this episode, we question how this narrative intersects with current ecologies of displacement and transformations of the populus in the City of Detroit, Michigan? We investigate these topics through a more informal interview about Evan’s own personal narratives and experiences with urban greening in Detroit, along with discussions surrounding current trends of reverse white flight and evolved settler colonialism as gentrification of the urban frontier. Enjoy the show!

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast

This is “All Roads Lead to Chinatown”, a podcast about deconstructing settler colonial narratives in architectural history. My name is Piao Liu and my name is Elena M’Bouroukounda and we are both from The School of Architecture in Princeton University. This podcast will analyze the reconstruction of San Francisco Chinatown through two architecture cases after the earthquake in 1906, exploring how the very image of Chinatown was realized, produced, and experienced in the beginning of the 20th century.

Show Notes available at:

https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast