Local cityscapes and transcultural imaginaries

This study examines the struggle over architectural space and meaning in the city of Mombasa (Kenya) on the east African coast during the colonial period and the continuities between this colonial past and the production of social imaginaries in the present. Mombasa is an ancient Swahili city, yet the materiality of its contemporary landscape was shaped by colonial transformation and upheaval. This work therefore focuses on the experiential significance of architectural space, ornament and setting and the ways individuals and communities re-imagined the seeming permanence of their urbanscape to counteract the unpredictable upheavals of colonial intervention. The broader aim of this project is to unpack and historicize the cultural crosscurrents between Mombasa, the African inland and other globally connected and rapidly changing sites in order to reconsider the processes by which meaning in produced for African architecture. Rather than focusing on the unidirectional impact Arab and European empires had on Mombasa, this study foregrounds the local dialectics taking place in the city's architectural cultures and their many densely tangled post-histories. As this work argues, the creation of an Afro-Indian Ocean modernity was enacted through the re-ordering of new forms within coastal frames of cultural reference. Architectural styles and forms reproduce, enact or even contest peoples' understandings of such seemingly abstract concepts as imperialism, commodification, communal belonging and religiosity in very different ways, depending on the historical moment of people's engagement with these concepts. By emphasizing the complex politics of colonial interventions, the expansion of economic territories, and the efficacy of Islam as a force for social protest, this dissertation does not posit material culture as a stable ground upon which a particular culture is inscribed. Rather, as the primary research presented in this work demonstrates, material culture, even in its monumental form of architecture, is unstable and mutable in meaning. In the case at hand, its forms are accessed during particular moments to strategically demarcate and claim rights over places specifically because culturally, socially and economically such African sites as Mombasa are transcultural and interdependent spaces.