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Faculty Scholarship Symposia - Ellis and ZugayFrom TTU College of ArchitectureThe 2009-2010 College of Architecture Faculty Scholarship SymposiaBring your lunch to room 1001 (faculty lounge) on Wednesdays at Noon and join us for an hour as one to three of our faculty from the College of Architecture make informal presentations and we have an open discussion over lunch and their ongoing scholarship.
November 18th, 2009 @ Noon : Ellis & ZugayClifton Ellis, PhD : "New Theories & Methods for Analyzing and Interpreting the Landscapes of Slavery" Architectural historians are beginning to explore creatively the relation between slavery and the built environment. In many cases, they have pushed beyond the bounds of their disciplines to employ methods and theories from other fields. The result is a rich, interdisciplinary mix of approaches and perspectives. Three theoretical concepts have emerged as being most helpful in providing a more complete understanding of the intersection between slavery and space: agency, racialization, and standpoint theory. “Agency” refers to a person’s ability to act voluntarily in pursuit of objectives of his or her own choosing. The question of slave agency has occupied historians for more than three decades. To what extent did enslaved Africans resign themselves to their fates and obey unthinkingly their masters’ and mistresses’ commands, and to what extent did they fight their condition and challenge their enslavement? Another useful concept for understanding the sites and spaces of slavery is racialization, a mechanism by which a people are marked as “different” or “other” on the basis of what is commonly called “race,” a concept that anthropologists and biologists have shown us has no basis in genetics but rather is a sociological construct. It is well known that during the early years of English colonization of North America, the ranks of indentured servants were filled by both white Europeans and Africans and that “perpetual servitude” was introduced only gradually. In Virginia, for example, slavery was first legalized in 1651, more than thirty years after Africans first landed in the colony. Slavery was a process of racialization that relied on the assertion that Africans were an inferior “race.” A third concept that has helped us appreciate the complexity of the landscapes of slavery is standpoint theory, which was first developed by feminist Marxist scholars who contended that women, because of their subjection to a patriarchic system, were able to perceive their place in the world, and that of their oppressors, in a wholly different and unique light. It was Karl Marx who posited the theory that the working class, in contrast to the capitalist class, has fundamentally different experiences with and understandings of power relations within the capitalist system. Thus, the working class possessed a special knowledge, separate from and equally valid and useful as that of the capitalists. Architectural historians of the vernacular pioneered methods of analysis that have also contributed greatly to efforts to recover the ordinary landscapes of the past and to understand the lives of the people who inhabited them. Committed more to a set of approaches to the built environment than to the study of any particular building types, vernacularists aim to understand sites within their larger social, spatial, and material contexts and to uncover the breadth of uses to which they were put. This seminar talk will consider through case studies some ways in which these theories have been applied to the study of antebellum landscapes in Ameirca.
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