Public Lecture: “Plotting Sovereignty, Staging Liberation”; Speaker: Kenny Cupers

Abstract:

What can the limits of postcolonial land restitution tell us about our planetary crisis today? Scholarship in architectural, urban, and environmental history has become increasingly planetary in scope, yet it has rarely engaged issues of land and sovereignty that postcolonial and African historians have long studied.

This talk develops earthmaking as a framework — attending to the slow and sticky infrastructural reorganization of land, labor, and ecology in the postcolony. Drawing on collaborative fieldwork with original performers of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Ngũgĩ wa Mirii’s I Will Marry When I Want (1977) and archival research on the forced resettlement village of Kamĩrĩĩthũ in Kenya’s former White Highlands, it traces how the plot, the plantation, the theatre, and the play became paradoxical instruments of postcolonial sovereignty.

The intervention is twofold: if the plantation rather than the city is the world-making spatial form in much of the global South, our analytical focus must reorient accordingly. And if the most precise theory of plantation afterlives was produced on an open-air stage before the bulldozers arrived, we must reckon with whose knowledge counts as analysis of our planetary crisis — and from what ground.

Kenny Cupers is Professor of Architectural History and Urban Studies at the University of Basel, where he co-founded and leads the Urban Studies division. Trained as an architect, urbanist, and historian, his research examines how built environments, infrastructure, and design articulate social, political, and ecological transformations in African and European societies. His work combines archival research with visual and spatial analysis, and is driven by collaborative forms of knowledge production.

He is currently pursuing three interconnected projects. The first is a feature-length documentary, developed with Kenyan theatre performers, activists, scholars, and filmmakers. The film grows out of a long-term research collaboration focused on how citizens use performance arts and architecture to confront the enduring afterlives of colonialism. The second is a related historical study that examines the unmaking of the plantation and the postcolony as intertwined political, ecological, and existential projects. The third project, with art historian Dr. Prita Meier, is an urban history of post-independence Nairobi that maps the ambiguous lives of liberation and consumption.

This lecture is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/67594280991?pwd=cSeT8fLNlYFfpb8rAiWIz0rpIbLRal.1

Meeting-ID: 675 9428 0991
Code: UrbysAz7S