“On the Edge of Legibility: Architecture and its Peripheries” Symposium Keynote Lecture: Ijlal Muzaffar

In 1930, the Croatian art historian Ljubo Karaman theorized the “freedom of the periphery” as a highly dynamic space of syncretism and geopolitical interrelation. Karaman and his theories, though, have themselves remained peripheral to the Anglo-American academy, whose discourse on peripherality has been shaped largely by world-systems theories. In Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1974 The Modern World-System, for example, the globe is partitioned according to unidirectional exchanges between a core and periphery, and cultural hegemony is merely contingent on economic domination. Poet and thinker Édouard Glissant would reject such a reduction two decades later. Challenging the West’s empirical imperative to render the world legible and transparent, Glissant called for our “right to opacity,” wherein knowledges are entangled, irreducible, confluent, and relativized. Considering opacity as a precondition for cultural freedom, how can architectural historians engage the periphery on its own terms and with its own methods?

While easily conceived economically and geographically, we propose a lingering in the periphery, putting pressure on capitalist temporality and liberal epistemologies. While architectural historiography has treated the peripheral in diverse ways, what themes, events, sites, and actors remain at the edge of its discourse? How can architectural history imbricate itself in questions of the temporal and knowable? Recent turns to indigenous knowledge and post-secular reevaluations of modernity are starting points for re-interrogating the periphery. Aware of our position within the American academy, our ambition for this symposium is to foster dialogue on how we can attend to, uphold, research, study, and understand each other opaquely.

Keynote Lecture by Ijlal Muzaffar Tracing the Anti-archive: Architectural History and the Problem of Political Memory

Not every structure of recording is or should be called an archive. Archive produces the structure of historical time as it is read by particular interpretive categories that rest on it. Other figures of remembrance exist outside the archive, making their presence felt within its gaps and haunting the narrations emerging from it. How should we give them veracity without trading in idealized subjects and opaque objects—the indigenous, the sacred, the mythic—that are often flattened through circumscribing respect? Architectural history has often avoided this challenge by projecting on these figurations the phenomenological idea of deep time. This othering mutes their political dynamics, reasserting modern historical time as the only legitimate duration of political imagination, and modern political imagination as the only legitimate form of resistance. Exploring histories of land settlement and displacement in colonial India, Muzaffar would attempt in this talk to articulate political imaginations that resist and assist in blurring the borders of historical time and its many narrations.

Ijlal Muzaffar is a Professor of Architectural History at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the author of Modernism’s Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital (University of Texas Press, 2024) and the co-editor of the volume Architecture in Development Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022). His work has been published widely in academic journals, museum and biennale catalogues, and edited volumes.

On the Edge of Legibility is generously sponsored by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Organized by Kian Hosseinnia and Zachary Torres, students in the Ph.D. in Architecture Program at GSAPP.