The Global and the Planetary: Postcolonial Ecocriticism in Architectural Historiography

Abstract

While architectural historians today continue to demonstrate an unprecedented commitment to issues of globalization and transculturality, there is an emerging body of literature on ecology, environmentalism, and environmentality as key subjects that attend to the interconnectedness of our vastly heterogeneous world. This ‘environmentalization’ of the discipline is noticeably less concerned with the asymmetries of geopolitically determined cultures. It diverges from decades of interdisciplinary conversations about the dismantling of Eurocentric canons, suggesting that the new ‘planetary perspective’ – with its ecospheric inclusivity beyond human subjectivity – will replace rather than extend the ‘global perspective’ of geographical inclusivity beyond European subjectivity. By considering an ecocritical direction in the humanities that is based on the critical insights of postcolonial literature, this essay contemplates a decolonized approach to studying architecture and ecology. Its methodological analysis supports the growth of architectural history into a trans-disciplinary field, one that advances knowledge of the built, natural, and social environments as deeply entangled, without privileging the Global North’s postindustrial interests over the assessment of Southern, Indigenous, and diasporic developments. Just as the modifier ‘global’ is anti-globalist and resists cultural hegemony, so too must ‘planetary’ signify more than a universalist vision of ecology that presupposes an undifferentiated humanity imperiling a generalized nature.