Roundtable: What is an Antiracist Architectural History?
What is an Antiracist Architectural History?
Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Jia Yi Gu, Ana María León, and Mabel O. Wilson
July 24, 2020
The recent Black Lives Matter protests following the murder of George Floyd have brought renewed attention to the need for pedagogies that incorporate the histories of racism and antiracism, both in the context of academia at large and in architecture programs specifically. Architectural history has long been a field where Eurocentric and white supremacist assumptions have remained unquestioned. These assumptions are replicated and disseminated, year after year, through institutions such as the survey course. As architectural historians and teachers, several of us have been rewriting our syllabi and lectures over the last few years to center racial histories in our architectural history and theory survey courses. This roundtable shares ideas for teaching anti-racist architectural history derived from the teacher-to-teacher workshop "Can We Teach an Antiracist Architectural History?" (July 17, 2020) and puts forward some preliminary thoughts on what constitutes an antiracist architectural history.
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