Race, Place, and Justice – serie

A singular architectural landmark bridging western Europe and the American SouthHow did the Belgian Friendship Building, originally constructed for the 1939 New York World’s Fair—and one of only a few surviving buildings from that celebrated exhibition—end up on the campus of an HBCU in Richmond, Virginia? In this richly illustrated book, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Katherine Kuenzli, and Bryan Clark Green relate the fascinating story, spanning three continents, of a distinctly modern structure that has towered over Virginia Union University, in a city characterized by its traditional architecture, for more than eighty years. It is a structure whose original purposes—to present modern Belgian design and to extol its racist, colonial regime—stand in stark contrast to its dedication in 1941 to Robert L. Vann, longtime editor of one of America’s most illustrious historic Black newspapers. The Belgian Friendship Building is an enduring example of prewar modernism designed by a team of Belgian architects under the direction of Henry van de Velde that has until now been all but forgotten in histories of modern architecture. This indispensable, multifaceted account ties together the history of modern European architecture, colonial exploitation, and African American achievement in a brilliant and compelling case study.

The material legacies of slavery across the Atlantic worldAtlantic slavery has bequeathed architectural legacies from the plantation ruins that fill the valleys of Cuba to the servant’s quarters of middle-class apartment housing in Brazil; from picturesque New England waterfronts to the modernist ranch-house suburbs of Savannah; and from the castle-studded coastline of Ghana to steel-framed commercial high-rises in South Carolina. The stories of these places are woven together by historical threads stretched across the past five hundred years, connecting them first through empire and forced migration, then by modern economic development and heritage tourism. Architectures of Slavery brings new clarity and critical insight to these visible injustices that still haunt so many societies in the Atlantic world, empowering its people to build more democratic and just places in the future.

The material legacies of slavery across the Atlantic worldAtlantic slavery has bequeathed architectural legacies from the plantation ruins that fill the valleys of Cuba to the servant’s quarters of middle-class apartment housing in Brazil; from picturesque New England waterfronts to the modernist ranch-house suburbs of Savannah; and from the castle-studded coastline of Ghana to steel-framed commercial high-rises in South Carolina. The stories of these places are woven together by historical threads stretched across the past five hundred years, connecting them first through empire and forced migration, then by modern economic development and heritage tourism. Architectures of Slavery brings new clarity and critical insight to these visible injustices that still haunt so many societies in the Atlantic world, empowering its people to build more democratic and just places in the future.

How enslaved workers provided the labor as well as the architectural expertise needed to build and sustain MauritiusUnlike most other sites of European colonialism, the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius had no indigenous population when the French set out to incorporate it into their imperial network. How, then, did its development differ from other colonial enterprises? And what lessons does that story hold? The Island of Bound Masters is an innovative and multifaceted history of the enslaved Africans and Indians who turned local basalt, coral, earth, and wood into economically viable built environments on Mauritius in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Dwight Carey shows how the labor and the ecological building knowledge of enslaved workers from overseas transformed the island's terrestrial resources into functional domestic infrastructure and a commercial architecture that ensured the subsequent rise of a successful multicultural society. This groundbreaking book draws upon laboratory analyses of structural and ecological remnants, archival research, and insights from geological and botanical science. Its interdisciplinary approach captures the essence of the intangible heritage of Mauritius and reveals how the enslaved sustained life through the strength of their ecological knowledge and the force of their labor.