A Report on the “Diasporic Architectural Histories” Session Held at the 2021 Society of Architectural Historians Annual International Conference, Québec, Montréal

Abstract

The “Diasporic Architectural Histories” session presented in April 2021 was organised by Mirjana Lozanovska and Anoma Pieris as part of the SAHANZ selection for the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) annual conference. Five papers developed for presentation were selected from thirty-five submitted abstracts, the array of abstract submissions by early career and established scholars revealing the escalation of interest in this field of research and its slow but glacial influence on architectural historiography. For many decades, including at the height of identity and cultural theory in the 1980s and 1990s, architectural historiography within colonial settler nations and in Europe appropriated critical theories but remained chal-lenged by the architecture of immigrant communities and unprivileged migration (including forced and economic migration). Except for a few scholars, the subject of migration was largely dismissed partly because such an architecture does not fit into the professional limits of an architect-centred discipline, nor does it fit easily within the scope of vernacular architecture. 1 Two anthologies and two monographs are foundational to the field. 2 Recent minority scholar activisms have advanced earlier foundational platforms of postcolonial theory, Critical Race Theory, Asian American Studies, and Inter-Asian Cultural Studies – lines of diasporic intellectual questioning of colonial and statist racial constructs – into architectural historiography. 3 These efforts continue to dislodge Euro-centred frameworks, but the reluctance of many architectural historians to step out of their expertise areas and perceive the canon as contingent on these worldviews means that an imbalance of knowledge is perpetuated. Diasporic spaces are seen as exceptional rather than integral to our percep-tions of the built environment. At the 2021 SAH conference, sessions pursuing these new terrains included “Transnational histories of