Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere - Couverture rigide

Meier, Sandy Prita

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0253019095 ISBN 13 : 9780253019097

Editeur : Indiana University Press, 2016

A propos du livre

Revue de presse :

"Prita Meier has turned the tired question of 'who are the Swahili' on its ear by eschewing essentialist descriptions and showing how Swahili people themselves actively managed their identities locally and beyond, and throughout colonial and national administrations." - --Jeffrey Fleisher, Rice University

"A groundbreaking architectural history of the Swahili coast, this book beautifully explores issues of cultural translation and the remapping of cultural boundaries. Prita Meier brilliantly demonstrates how the emerging fields of world art history and transcultural studies are coming together to provide new ways of studying the making of art and culture. She documents the way spaces once celebrated as icons of Muslim culture are now imbricated by the ethnic politics of the modern postcolonial nation-state and offers a new model for rethinking cosmopolitanism in the global context of the Indian Ocean." - --Salah M. Hassan, Cornell University

"This sophisticated book does much more than show us an Indian Ocean Africa that was the parallel to Atlantic Africa. Withgreatclarity and commitmentPrita Meier gives us the world of Swahili port cities that were not only trans-oceanic but trans-continental, places where merchants, slaves, nobles, and sailors met and exchanged ideas, styles, and commodities. Taste and ideas about decor were conspicuously displayed through objects and styles that wereliterally constructed from the experience of trade and travel in order to bring elsewhere home." - --Luise White, University of Florida

Présentation de l'éditeur :

On the Swahili coast of East Africa, monumental stone houses, tombs, and mosques mark the border zone between the interior of the African continent and the Indian Ocean. Prita Meier explores this coastal environment and shows how an African mercantile society created a place of cosmopolitan longing. Meier understands architecture as more than a way to remake local space. Rather, the architecture of this liminal zone was an expression of the desire of coastal inhabitants to belong to places beyond their homeports. Here architecture embodies modern ideas and social identities engendered by the encounter of Africans with others in the Indian Ocean world.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Indiana University Press
• Date d'édition: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0253019095
• ISBN 13: 9780253019097
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 242