Anti-Capitalist Realism

If modernity creates anti-emancipatory opacities, the post-colonial method proposes strategies of high-resolution, of brutal honesty, of cynical critique. Where pseudoscientific and once depoliticized diagrams, self-serving theories, and incomplete accounts of history tried to render a logical evolution of Euroamerican progress and prosperity, the post-colonial method renders them full of blood, barbed wire, apartheid walls, and spilled organic matter. The logic that tries to explain styles and movements in a “rational” order is interrupted by the visceral brutality of the Eurocentric machine of extraction and death.

At its core, the post-colonial method is a work of anti-capitalist realism that acknowledges the unsustainable character of a knowledge and material economy made possible by the inhumane occupation of Indigenous land and the brutal materialization of anti-Black racism and its aftermath. When the post-colonial method collages and composes prose and images, anti-capitalist realism bluntly renders with evidence and reading lists.

As the praxis of post-colonial theory, anti-capitalist realism challenges old biased diagrams with post-colonial ones, replaces Eurocentric reading lists with anti-colonial, transfeminist, and anti-imperialist syllabi, and writes Manuals of anti-racist architectural education that focus as much on the content as on the formats of education for social and ecological justice.

Chronocartography of anti-Black Regimes

History doesn’t exist. Historical narratives do really exist, like propaganda: though rendered with ideology, they are real productions that satisfy the positions of settler-colonization, ruling classes, capitalism, white-supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. Architectural History™, which organizes the reduction of systems of extraction, accumulation, capture, and predation to white-washed accounts of style, aesthetized movements, and depoliticized asymmetrical power relations, is incapable of presenting a critical account of its alliance with systems of human oppression and ecological spoliation. Architectural theory has been its masterpiece.⁵

At the root of the canonized architectural history lie a thousand theories that reinforce the status quo. As hegemonic regimes shape and fund architectural histories and theories that multiply like trees in a forest, anti-racist forms of historical narrative must dig down into the soil of ideology and address architecture’s white-supremacist, capitalist, and heteropatriarchal roots. Among these, the multiple iterations of Charles Jencks’ ‘Evolutionary Tree’ highlight the construction of historical narratives that overemphasize Eurocentric worldviews, while overlooking and erasing the systems of extraction that have historically fueled, funded, and shaped them. The Chronocartography of anti-Black Regimes shows how most of the 20th century takes place as Jim Crow (USA), Apartheid (South Africa), and White Australia Policy are consolidated as part of the legal system across three different continents, making white supremacy officially a planetary law.

Post-Colonial Oriented Ontology

Turned into a graphic method, a Post-Colonial Oriented Ontology diagram outlines how in the greater picture of western modernity, post-modernism in its relationship with modernism is part of an uninterrupted circle that ties the Eurocentric universalism to the Enlightenment, extraction, colonialism, and the construction of Blackness and race.Post-modernism continues modernism’s practice of abstraction that aims to explicate, by means of overlooking and ignoring, the white supremacist and colonizing violence of Western modernity. By rendering visible the tools of abstraction inside an area of post-colonial resolution, Post-Colonialism can do to colonialism what post-modernism wishes to do to modernism: critically expose the problematic infrastructures that holds the entire predecessor’s project together.

Anti-Racist Manuals and Manifestoes

Divided in three parts (before, during, and after school), and an appendix that addresses the precarity of anti-racist academic labor, A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education centers architecture and architectural education in the struggles against racism and the material legacy of white supremacy. A valuable resource for designers, educators, students, and anybody who’s lives are affected by the built and destroyed environment, this anti-racist manual unveils how architecture and architectural education is shaped by the construction of race and outlines ways to imagine emancipatory architectures. Divided in three parts, the manual discusses economic, cultural, political, spatial, and historical hurdles that must be overcome before, during, and after school. An appendix presents an overview on the precarious labor of anti-racist education. Through diagrams, analytical texts, and manifestos, A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education asks many questions about the current state of architecture and imagines a future centered on social and ecological justice.

Post-Novis Syllabus

In the radical spirit of Post-Novis, the syllabus that follows is inspired in the lectores of tobacco factories a century ago. For each worldmaking session, we will meet at a different venue around the world. Sessions do not meet weekly or monthly but in intervals determined by an ever-growing spiral temporality inspired in the Zapatistas: the first two sessions are 1 month apart, then the next is 2 months after, then 3 months, then 5 months after, then 8 months, 13 months, 21 months, 34 months and the last two sessions are 55 months apart. The Following is an open invitation to meet, gather, read, discuss, question, challenge, propose, subvert, develop, create, denounce, alter, break, restart.

Read the whole "A Loudreaders Guide to the Post-Colonial Method" column by WAI Architecture Think Tank.

Bio

WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism. Founded in Brussels in 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author and theorist Cruz Garcia and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one several platforms of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade-school LOUDREADERS. Garcia and Frankowski are Associate Professors at Iowa State University, faculty at Columbia University, and have held visiting professorships at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, The School of Architecture at Taliesin. Their work has been part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial and exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art New York, Neues Museum in Nuremberg, and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology Lisbon.They are authors of Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture, A Manual of Anti-Racist Architecture Education, and the upcoming book Universal Principles of Architecture.