Stream Convenors: Emmanuel Ofori-Sarpong, PhD Candidate, SOAS, University of London eo15@soas.ac.uk
Dr Maria Ambrozy, Lecturer in Peace Studies and International Development, University of Bradford m.ambrozy@bradford.ac.uk
‘Contesting the Environment: Symbols, Architecture, Memory and Power in Making African Worlds’ seeks to bring together researchers interested in interrogating the role of built symbols in mediating questions of memory, identity, power, and resistance. Such spatial interventions – encompassing architecture and urban design, sculpture, public art, and other structures – carry profound political significance in the memories and identities that actors choose to represent and (re)construct through them.
This stream aims to engage critically with narratives and the accompanying built artefacts through which states and their citizens seek to (re)construct the past, present, and future, revealing how power and memory are inscribed in space. We are interested in how these narratives, entangled with the enduring legacies of colonialism in Africa, shape the ambitions and contradictions of post-independence nation-building and contemporary practices of socio-spatial exclusion, as well as how similar artefacts in and beyond Africa’s borders exert indirect yet potent influence on the Making of African Worlds. We are also keen to interrogate how these narratives open up discursive and imaginative spaces for resistance, restoration, appropriation, and redevelopment.
Accordingly, we invite contributions that explore:
· How political agents draw on architecture, urban design, sculptural and public art forms to contest, or re-articulate dominant African historical narratives (colonial, postcolonial, and post-independence alike).
· The motivations, interests, and ideas that underpin efforts to re-imagine public spaces and the collective memories associated with them.
· The mechanisms and dynamics that determine whose memories are preserved, silenced, or marginalised within spatial and symbolic landscapes.
· The politics of construction and erasure — what is built, what is left unbuilt, and the implications of these choices for articulating power and belonging.
Suggestions/Ideas for Possible Panels within this Stream: Panel 1: The Politics of State Memory and Popular Contestation
Monuments, broadly defined, are among the most visible and contested sites of state memory and power. They act as focal points for the materialisation, erasure, and resistance of particular conceptions of the state, its past and desired future. This panel invites contributions exploring the dialectical interplay between top-down and bottom-up contestations that shape how monuments are made, remade, removed, reinterpreted, or resisted. Whose narratives are mobilised or muted across shifting
political terrains? We welcome papers that examine the monument as a political instrument and a terrain of struggle, where the state’s quest for legitimacy meets popular agency.
Panel 2: The postcolonial national museum: Curating collective memory between architecture, power and memory
The national museum is a complex institution with roots in the colonial past. As containers of state-sanctioned histories, national museums offer insight into how memory is mediated, framed, displayed, and experienced. In this panel we centre the architecture of the national museum. We explore how such buildings are conceived, designed, and commissioned, and by whom. We invite contributions that consider architecture and curatorial practice as intertwined expressions of state power and collective memory of the postcolonial state.
Panel 3: The Monumental City: Power, Memory, and the Politics of Urban Symbolism
Postcolonial African states have, since independence, been sites of ambitious city-building initiatives. This panel invites scholars of African urban studies, architecture, and politics to reflect on the modes of memorialisation and narrative through which states frame these new cities and urban megaprojects as expressions of identity, memory, aspiration, and resistance to colonial legacies.
