Scholarship in Communion: Writing on Architecture and Empire
Sonali Dhanpal, Sben Korsh and Y.L. Lucy Wang
How might writing groups broaden the mandate of academic societies to better support not just the dissemination and recognition of research, but also its production? Discussing their ambitions in organising a writing group, Sonali Dhanpal, Sben Korsh and Y.L. Lucy Wang explain how this format is especially suited to nurture emerging projects on architecture and empire.
As three PhD researchers in architectural history, we met through the alchemy that is Twitter. Kindred spirits from our work on the British Empire and (post)colonial history, we joined together last summer to launch a writing group on architecture and empire.
Who wants to do a writing group for PhDs / early-career folks doing dissertations / first books related to architectural history and the British Empire? Interested in connecting with people outside my institution in an empathetic yet structured form, sharing chapters, etc.
— Sben Korsh (@sbenkorsh) July 9, 2020
At first this was just a tentative idea, tweeted out from writerly blues, but to our delight, two trustees of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain reached out and encouraged us to bring this group to fruition. In autumn 2020, with a draft proposal in hand, we met with stakeholders from the Society and received helpful feedback. We released a call for participants in mid-November, proposing ‘an empathetic structure for scholars writing books and dissertations on imperial and colonial histories’. Applications closed in mid-January of this year, but you can still read the call here.
In this essay, we discuss why the format of a writing group is particularly important to those researching architecture and empire, why this motivated us to form it, and how communal writing aspires towards a more just and open academe.
All historical research is complex, whether finding primary source materials, writing with a balance of argument and evidence, or presenting one’s research in ways that others can engage with. Yet the process of writing postcolonial histories is particularly complicated, coming up against the legacies of imperialism that include the dominant and conservative mythologies of nationalism and white supremacy. We are especially aware of these legacies from our position at research universities in the United Kingdom and United States. Our universities are set within the unequal landscape of global higher education and research. Michigan was established through the US settler-colonial program of land-grant universities; Columbia began through royal charter by George II of Great Britain; and Newcastle formed through the imperial wealth of Great Britain’s industrial nineteenth century. These formations in what was the metropole still inform our access and authority, and continue to benefit us in ways that are not available to scholars from the global south.
To share some of the difficulties we encounter as postcolonial historians, we turn briefly to ‘the archive’ – a repository of records and other materials. The archive remains integral to how knowledge is produced and legitimised. As media-studies scholar Kate Eichhorn explains in her book on feminist archives, the making of an archive is the making of new knowledge. The literal order of the archive – its indexing, organisation and management – bleeds into how colonial histories are formed. Postcolonial scholars must use archives to understand our unequal world by reading ‘along the grain’, as suggested by historical anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler. This entails evaluating how the documents came to be – who wrote them, what was their power, what were their interests, who the documents hide and why – in order to situate them within colonial histories that are marked with subjugation and dispossession.
1. The British Library, where the India Office Records are now housed. Photo: Sonali Dhanpal.
2. The Vidhana Soudha in Bangalore, home of the Karnataka State Archives. Photo: Sonali Dhanpal.
3. Confidential documents from an unnamed archive in Hong Kong. Photo: Sben Korsh.
Studying empire, we are compelled to spend copious hours in archives housed in repositories in imperial heartlands, despite the site of examination often being on a different continent. For instance, Sonali, who studies housing in colonial India, can make sense of the archives she finds at the British Library (fig. 1) only by corroborating them with their counterparts housed in the Karnataka State Archives, India (fig. 2). When formal records are not always preserved and are epistemologically separated through the empire’s bureaucracy, the unravelling process of the archive necessitates generating one’s own ‘archive’. As the literary scholar Lisa Lowe’s work shows, the documents we still have about the British Empire are categorically separated, requiring scholars to trace the ‘intimate’ connections that tied together the Americas, Africa and Asia.
These imperial formations are still active, and our task is to critically examine how these ways of thinking have altered from the past into the present. But the archive makes this difficult. For instance, Sben researches how the spaces of stock-trading in Hong Kong were key to the transformation from British financial imperialism to China’s neoliberal present. In the archives of the stock exchange, however, traces of this changeover are few and far between, requiring uncounted months alone sifting through disordered files one by one (fig. 3). This labour is typical of archival research on postcolonial histories, yet it often goes unrecognised in academic venues.
Another burden of the colonial archive exists in the chasm between architectural and area studies scholarship. In the former, colonial spaces often occupy the fringes of canonical narratives. Meanwhile, in the latter, intellectual and political histories are often framed as more agentive than spaces and places. The task of the postcolonial architectural historian, then, is to bridge these two spheres, to centre certain objects – buildings, maps, images and visual culture – as well as certain geographies. In Lucy’s scholarship, this two-fold bridging act addresses architectural expertise and disease. Her work examines late-Qing and Republican-era China, where colonial, imperial and missionary entities transcended individual empires to form networks of cooperation, specifically in sanitation reform and public health. Thus, not only must the archive be interrogated for evidence of regional singularity, but it must also reveal architectural objects as agents of change.
Researcher from the anglo-sphere presenting: My starting point is an obscure fact from 60-70's Britain that you should all know already as universal
— Sonali Dhanpal (@sonali_dhanpal) December 16, 2020
Me presenting: Please look at a map of India now focus on Bangalore. This is for the benefit of those who had no idea they existed
Typically, for most historians, the solitude of the archive is alleviated through the academy’s formal means of scholarly dissemination, such as conferences, journals and awards. Yet this too has its limits and inequalities. The unique alienation that comes with writing about empire, such as the problems of archival research outlined above, motivates us to focus on the production process of scholarship.
Our answer is to form a writing group that offers both encouragement and solidarity while studying empire and its discontents. As a community, we hope to read and offer feedback on chapters from our theses and monographs. In proposing this particular form, we are less focused on setting an intellectual agenda on empire itself. Rather, we aim to support those in the process of writing on the topic already, to embolden their voice as they narrate new histories. While the idea of a writing group is nothing new, the practice typically privileges pre-existing connections within a singular department, university or circles of former peers and colleagues. Stepping away from this, we extended the initiative beyond our personal contacts, releasing an open call that asked not for CVs, but abstracts of applicant’s scholarly projects and a brief letter to substantiate their motivations.
We were initially hesitant to collaborate with an academic society, since many institutions approach diversity and representation in a superficial manner, in order to avoid scrutiny and shore up support. Upon releasing the call for participants, we even received good-faith criticism about conducting such a project within a pre-existing institution. But we were encouraged to do so by the fact that SAHGB is evaluating its imperial legacies and forming several networks in its equality, diversity and inclusion efforts. One of these is the Race and Ethnicity Network. This network has been slower to form than others, but by nesting our writing group under its umbrella, we hope to help build its momentum.
We convened our initial meeting on 22 February, bringing together a group of 26 members, many new to SAHGB, helping to broaden and strengthen its constituency. In academia today, we already see a proliferation of new networks, affiliates, chapters and working groups that emphasise mutuality, encouragement and creation. This writing group aims to be one of these many emergent forms of collaborative and horizontal communion. As its conveners, we are optimistic about its potential and hope more such groups will follow.
Sonali Dhanpal is an architect and built heritage conservationist, currently the Forshaw Scholar at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, for her PhD in architectural history. Breaking new ground on colonial urbanism in South Asia, her research focuses on Bangalore, a capital of a princely state, examining residential extensions and housing between the late 19th and early 20th century.
Sben Korsh is a historian, curator and educator of buildings, landscapes and political economy. He is a PhD student in architecture history at the University of Michigan, and holds degrees in the subject from the University of Hong Kong, University of California, Berkeley, and the City University of New York. His research examines spaces of financial work, such as individual office buildings or entire financial districts.
Y.L. Lucy Wang is a PhD candidate at Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology, specialising in modern architecture, with an interest in the Sinosphere of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research more broadly addresses colonial modernisms and diasporic architecture in the Qing, British, and French empires.