CFP: Architecture and Whiteness in the Early Modern World
Canada
CFP for an edited volume tentatively titled “Architecture and Whiteness in the E̶a̶r̶l̶y̶ ̶M̶o̶d̶e̶r̶n̶ World.” The volume is co-edited by Dijana O. Apostolski (McGill University) and Aaron White (Mississippi State University) and is considered for publication as part of the Routledge Series on Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities, edited by Nicholas R. Jones (Yale University) and Derrick Higginbotham (University of Hawaii at Manoa).
Framing whiteness as a sensorial quality connate with ethical, aesthetic, epistemological, and ontological hierarchies, this edited volume will examine how the category of whiteness shaped architectural theories and practices across periods, peoples, and geographies. What was architecture’s role in race-making, constructions of whiteness, and processes of othering more generally? How was whiteness architecturally questioned, reinforced, conceptualized, practiced, and materialized? And how did whiteness intersect with categories such as class, nation, gender, beauty, hygiene, and health? In sixteenth-century Italy, for instance, architects theorized and practiced whiteness as analogous to fairness, purity, health, and morality. During Japan’s Edo Period, women’s powdered faces symbolized moral and aesthetic value. By invoking the white heron, the Himeji “White Heron” Castle (c.1617), also known as Hakuro-jō or Shirasagi-jō, architecturally emblematized grace and nobility.
We look forward to proposals that address architectural engagements with whiteness, concepts of race, and othering outside of Europe and European colonialisms, as well as examples from early modern Europe and the Atlantic world. Topics may include, but are not limited to, architectural treatises, drawings, maps, surveying reports, travel narratives, institutions, dwellings, building materials and techniques, demolition, interiors, historiography, periodization, and architectural controversies.