Publisher Jap Sam Books, Canadian Centre for Architecture

Fugitive Archives: A sourcebook for Centring Africa in Histories of Architecture is published by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Jap Sam Books in the context of the project Centring Africa: Postcolonial Perspectives on Architecture, the 2019-2022 iteration of the CCA's Multidisciplinary Research Program, organized with the support of the Mellon Foundation

+++

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 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 format, the sources multiply histories by highlighting diverse actors, practices, and geographies--on and off the continent--implicated in the history of architecture in Africa. 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.