Seminar News

Summer Hart: You open the book with the statement: “A refugee camp is not an object. It is one prolonged event in history marked by architecture.” Can you talk about the ways in which the architecture of a refugee camp might be considered a living archive?

Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi: One of my central arguments in Architecture of Migration is that understanding the architecture of the Dadaab refugee camps as an archival artifact enables a long view of history, and a concept history. This is one of the primary contributions of the book. The book demonstrates this method in concrete detail in ways that others can apply to their own work, and it gathers important theory on how to apply this method across historically diverse contexts beyond Africa, beyond architectural history, and beyond the sociopolitical and material space of the refugee camp. I learned from Dadaab, as an outgrowth of multiple forces at once: generations-long migratory traditions of handicraft and ecologically-derived building, centuries-long liberal social practices centering individualistic rights and morality around the notion of rescue, decades-long colonial constructions of territory and modern rational approaches to architecture and planning, and recent interventions growing out of development and humanitarian aid strategies that privileged fabrications of mobile and rapidly deployable assemblies. The extraordinary architecture of the camps, much of it made of organic material quite literally growing out of the ground to be shaped by human hands, bears economic, political, and visual rhetorical signification in situ, which is not evident from a distance. While it is a common methodology in art and architectural history to look to the artifact as a source of knowledge about the past, for Architecture of Migration, it became a core concern to think with this architecture in order to see differently and understand the past on new terms. Duke University Press very much wanted me to illustrate the book with many images of the camp, and I did include over one hundred images—my photographs and archival drawings I was able to acquire—quite literally as an archive of an ephemeral architecture.

SH: Can you describe the cover art and why you chose it?

AS: The work on the cover is by my dear friend and collaborator Deqa Abshir, who I met in Nairobi after coming across a body of her paintings, titled “Foundations.” Her study provided figurations of the east African tuqul, or waab in Somali, the handcrafted dwelling that I write about in many chapters of the book, as a recalcitrant architecture. The tuqul defies colonial fixing of the African dwelling for the purposes of taxation; its domed shape and woven cladding reject connection to the grids of civil infrastructure; it is the product of generations of architectural and building tradition, and consummates gendered ritual as the medium and result of knowledge sharing between women; and it is a historically-, culturally-, community-, and family-specific handicrafted object. The tuqul populates the Dadaab refugee camps, as well as other camps and the general landscape in east Africa. This mobile architecture was developed to move with the pastoralist caravan, intended to be demounted and attached to backs of camels as communities traveled. In Dadaab, it is fixed in space, creating a visual oxymoron. Deqa Abshir’s work looks at the waab as a radical space of interiority: an enclosure where people undertake homemaking and worldmaking in emergency, slowing down time and conditioning space for caregiving, comfort, and joy. She examines the aesthetically overlooked object that, in the camps, is often constructed from humanitarian waste—recycled tarps, fabrics, plastics—whose interior is often decorated lovingly, with rugs, metal incense holders brimming with smoke, sheer curtains, color, modifications of light through translucency and shadow… Together, we cropped her painting Fragmented II, which appears as the frontispiece of the Afterword, to create the image on the cover. The book designer at Duke University Press threaded the beautiful colors in her painting throughout the book in the chapter dividers and title text. This advanced a cohesive demand across the book to take aesthetics as seriously as politics—to examine history and form together, as entangled.

SH: You were co-chair of The University Seminar on Studies in Contemporary Africa from 2019-2025. How did this experience influence your own scholarship?

AS: I am deeply indebted to the generous frameworks of African and African Diaspora Studies and Global Black Thought in my work. In the first year that I was employed by this institution, the seminar (at that time co-chaired by our colleagues Abosede George and Rhiannon Stephens), invited me to present my research.

SH: What are you currently working on?

AS: I am writing a book called Ecologies of the Past.