Abstract

I propose a Black ethics of architecture as a sealed island space against the expanding, imperial sea of modern urban logics. Beginning with Hamid Dabashi and Walter Mignolo’s movements away from the dogma of European philosophy, I then closely read the ways in which Denise Ferreira da Silva takes this movement much further in her radical and difficult ruptures in Kantian spacetime. Da Silva’s project is the opening of a form of subjectivity that precedes spacetime. I read this through Pier Vittorio Aureli’s idea of the archipelago, arguing that imperial expansion is the inherent process of the city, against which he proposes the island—a station of secluded resistance to urban totalization. I read these propositions together in my local area of London, the Elephant and Castle, where the current redevelopment attempts an expansive homogenization of racialized aesthetics, rendering urban housing complicit in the imperial mode of neoliberal expansion. Against the developers' maps, I analyze the map of activist group the 35% Campaign, which has constructed an archipelagic code of the redevelopment area, separating the housing units from their contexts and essentializing them as possibilities of housing, disconnected from their constitution of the ampliative developers’ mode. I propose a Black island mode of thinking the city, and argue for a link in the scholarship of contemporary Black studies and urban activism.