Fugitive Archives: A Sourcebook for Centring Africa in Histories of Architecture

A collection of primary sources chosen by the research fellows Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture, Doreen Adengo, Dele Adeyemo, Warebi Gabriel Brisibe and Ramota Obagah-Stephen, Rachel Lee and Monika Motylinska, Ikem Stanley Okoye, Cole Roskam, Łukasz Stanek, and Huda Tayob.

Fugitive Archives is not a book about African architecture or its history. It is a book about the role of primary research in the work of the fellows and about how, to centre Africa in histories of modern architecture, they had to develop new ways of finding, seeing, and listening. The sources presented here are starting points for dismantling and expanding existing architectural archives, in which what is considered valuable enough to archive remains dominated by colonial or Western knowledge frameworks. Through varied media and formats, the sources multiply narratives by highlighting diverse actors, practices, and geographies—on and off the continent—implicated in the history of modern African architecture. Rather than suggesting key, but inevitably reductive, themes, this book brings the fellows and their sources into dialogue in three sections that foreground similar methods and challenges to locating, accessing, reading, and constructing otherwise fugitive archives.