In this episode Charles L. Davis II (UT Austin) speaks with Dianne Harris (University of Washington) about the trajectory of her research throughout her career, from the explicit and implicit ways Frank Lloyd Wright addressed questions of race in his work to the broader implications of Whiteness in the American suburbs ..read more

In this episode Charles L. Davis II (UT Austin) speaks with Rebecca Tinio McKenna (University of Notre Dame) and David Brody (Parsons School of Design) on their books which investigate the ways architecture helped to reinforce American cultural influence over the Philippines.  ..read more

Our guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. This episode considered landscapes of monumentality through iconoclasm, replacement, and renaming of built and natural str ..read more

Our guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. This episode discussed Indigenous thinking on infrastructure and architecture as sites for historical consciousness and co ..read more

Our guest series "Building Solidarities," organized by Dr. Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi and students in the course "Colonial Practices," was originally staged as a series of discussions at Barnard College and Columbia University Institute of Comparative Literature and Society in the fall of 2020. The series was conceived as a form of mutual pedagogy between the campus and the public, through dialogues on urgent questions about constructed environments, urban life, and ecologies. This episode discussed structuring cultural institutions and critical communities of black-brown solidarity in the African ..read more

Show notes available at: https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast ..read more

In this episode, we take a trip to Wakanda, the fictional country in Marvel’s Black Panther, and explore and analyze the speculative architecture through a dual-lens of Afrofuturism and settler colonialism. What can we learn about architecture from Wakanda? And how can Black Panther learn from the critiques of the series' first installment? Show Notes available at: https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast ..read more

Porches, their origin in the United States as a space constructed by and for the Black body, has become a key architectural space fundamental to Black culture as a space for exchange, storytelling and comfort. The porch, as a typology, often linked to the shotgun house, through its image making, produces a symbol for Black Identity in the United States. It therefore subverts the settler colonialist strategies and regimes of exclusion and the history of producing spaces around whiteness. By looking at the construction of these liminal spaces produced at the boundary between the private dwelling ..read more

Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy, published in 1987-1989 and republished in 2000 as Lilith’s Brood, follows the generational struggle of humanity against the alien race called the Oankali. Through an analysis of the events of the book, this podcast will situate the trilogy as a precursor to Afrofuturism within a context of settler colonialism. Through our conversation we will briefly delve into: how settler-colonialism has historically approached indigeneity; feminist models of resistance; race and representation; and the language settler colonialism uses to categorize architecture. Show No ..read more

In this podcast, we examine Little Tokyo in Los Angeles in the 1940s during and after Japanese American internment, its brief transformation into a prominent center of black life called Bronzeville, and the role of whiteness in the formation and subjugation of non-white spaces. By examining general understandings of “ethnic landscapes” alongside the history of racialized spaces like ‘ghettoes,’ we seek to uncover overlooked histories latent within them that reveal racial dynamics still relevant today. https://www.sahraah.com/race-podcast ..read more