The ASA team is delighted to have signed a contract with James Currey for a new book, Architecture and Politics in Africa: making, living and imagining identities through buildings, edited by Joanne Tomkinson, Daniel Mulugeta and Julia Gallagher.
Architecture and Politics in Africa explores how public buildings and spaces work as objects through which international relationships, domestic politics and cultural identity are negotiated.
Its 13 chapters look at how elites use buildings to create state symbols, project national identity and organise citizens; and how citizens accept, adapt and subvert them in very different ways around the continent.
The book will be published in paperback and as a free online edition in September 2022.
Architecture and Politics in Africa
making, living and imagining identities through buildings
Joanne Tomkinson, Daniel Mulugeta & Julia Gallagher (eds)
Forthcoming, James Currey, 2022
Introduction Daniel Mulugeta, Joanne Tomkinson and Julia Gallagher
Making
1. Global ambitions and national identity in Ethiopia’s airport expansion, Joanne Tomkinson and Dawit Yekoyesew
2. Building heaven on earth: rhetoric and ritual over Ghana’s national cathedral, Emmanuel Kusi Ofori-Sarpong
3. China’s ‘parliament building gift’ to Malawi: rationale, tensions and asymmetrical gains, Innocent Batsani Ncube
4. New homes for a new state: foreign ideas in Ghana’s public housing programmes, Irene Appeaning Addo
Living
5. Beautiful state/ugly state: architecture and political authority in Côte d’Ivoire, Julia Gallagher & Ariane N’djoré
6. Colonial legacies in architectures of consumption: Sam Levy’s Village in Harare, Tonderai Koschke
7. Public spaces, public goods?: reinventing Nairobi’s public libraries, Marie Gibert
8. The role of architecture in South African detention cases during the apartheid era, Yusuf Patel
Imagining
9. Pan-African imaginations: the AU building and its popular imagery in Ethiopia and Nigeria, Daniel Mulugeta
10. Asantean Noumena: the politics and imaginary reconstruction of the Asante Palace, Kumase, Tony Yeboah
11. From prison to freedom: overwriting the past, imagining Nigeria, Laura Routley
Afterword Kuukuwa Manful