react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Despite how they are sometimes articulated, histories are rarely singular stories. Shaped by overlapping social, political, and economic forces, dynamic cultural geographies, and historical agents with conflicting interests, histories are stories with a nearly endless capacity for telling and retelling. The historian’s challenge is to tell these stories without foreclosing this complexity. In The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra, Joseph Godlewski confronts this challenge by adopting a theoretical framework of entanglement to analyze the spatial history of Calabar, a port city in southeastern Nigeria, from the sixteenth century to the present. Refusing a singular understanding of Calabar’s history, Godlewski uses entanglement to tell a history of linkages, between local and global, past and present, spatial and socio-political, that presents the spatial history of Calabar as one of multiple intersecting temporalities and geographies. Drawing upon a wide range of archival sources, Godlewski centers the spatial dynamics of Calabar to bring the city into architectural discourse, demonstrate its centrality to the construction of global modernity, and illustrate its spatial paradigms as sites of Black identity formation.