wati Chattopadhyay (History of Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara) will speak on “The Spatial Politics of Marginality” on March 3, 2015 at 4:30 p.m. at the Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum (600 S. Gregory Street, Urbana). This event is free and open to the public.
How does one recuperate from the archive, spaces and people who have been marginalized, dominated as it is by the discourse of the elite and powerful? How do we access the everyday spaces of women and servants who have left only small footprints in the historical archive? How do we recognize practices that challenge the dominant view of the state?
These processes often involve spaces that may not be small in extent but remain peripheral in disposition, importance, and imagination and are marked by the difficulty of representation. Utilizing examples from domestic spaces of British colonial India and urban sites in postcolonial India, Chattopadhyay will argue for a geography of small spaces that might help us understand the representational logic of marginality. Recognition of such a geography, she will suggest, must entail a radical understanding of materiality.
Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor and Chair in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She served as Editor of the Journal of the “Society of Architectural Historians” (JSAH) and “JSAH Online” from 2011-2014, and is the author of “Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny” (Routledge, 2005), and “Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field” (Minnesota, 2012). She is also co-editor with Jeremy White of “City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards of Global History of Urban Public Space” (Routledge, 2014) and a forthcoming volume on “Contemporary Architecture and Theory” also from Routlege.
This event is co-sponsored by IPRH and the Spurlock Museum.
Thanks to the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities listserv for this information item.
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