 Welcome to all, I'm Ryan Hope-Martin, it's my pleasure on behalf of my colleagues here at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and our good friend Keller Easton, it's my distinct honor to introduce this evening's Douglas Merton's lecturer, Professor Dwight Carey. Before I do that, just a few words to mark the occasion. I was saying before, I can't quite believe it, but it's been over a dozen years since the inaugural lecture in this series, which is devoted, I think you know, to the histories of modernity and was established in 2011, with color's generosity, to commemorate the untimely passing, but also, I think the untimely, and maybe I would say at least, unapologetically modern life of our dear friend, the architectural historian, Deathleth Merton. His was a life lived unbound by the darkness of modern times, a kind of dialectical darkness reflected in glass, that Deathleth, at least, and I, I'm sure for many others too, but it just seemed like we were always discussing this, endlessly, but alas, and sadly all too briefly, in our shared admiration for the complex thinkers, for example, of the Frankfurt School, and especially for Deathleth, the German-Jewish philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Characteristically, Deathleth addressed many of his published writings again, I think most hear now, to the affirmative, generative side of Benjamin's thought. But like all of us, he knew well the tragedy by which that thought was marked, and not only the historical tragedy in flight from which Benjamin took his own life in 1940, but the tragedy of history itself. So most of you know the image, the sort of famous image. A picture, actually it's a monoprint, by Paul Clay, depicts a figure to which Clay gave the name, Angolis Novus, the new angel, staring out at us, eyes wide, mouth open, wings spread. For Benjamin, where we see a chain of events, this angel sees a single mounting catastrophe, piling wreckage at its feet. The angel would like to stay and repair the damage, but, you know, a wind is blowing the figure on him. Of course, is this an allegory, is this allegory of history also somehow the historian? Wind is blowing this figure backwards into the future. In Laurie Anderson's rendition, this storm, this storm is called progress. Now of course we need only put a date, also 1940, to Benjamin's famous Angel of History, to know the specific historical catastrophe, the full scope of which he himself did not live to see. But all too sadly again, what has made this image of this angel ring so true, so unbearably timely for us even today, is the chain of tragedy upon tragedy that continues to build this pile of death and debris skyward. This is exactly what not what, you know, this is my point in a way, Detlef was so extraordinarily generous and affirmative in his spirit that this is kind of basically what we talk about. This pile of debris building skyward as it has done for centuries. And yet again recalling the spirit, that the spirit, in fact for me his slightly mischievous optimistic laugh. It remains our task to imagine that along the way at least some of the damage might be repaired, if only in the fullness of time. But necessarily nonetheless, well okay so to my mind and you know perhaps stretching this chain of seemingly unrelated events to its breaking point, I do think that it's a similar sense of historical and we can also add today ecological reconstruction and repair of living, working and growing in and among the ruins that brings Dwight Carey to us this evening as I think you'll see. Dwight A. Carey is assistant professor of art and the history of art at Amherst College where he works and teaches at the limits of architectural studies. Dwight's fundamentally interdisciplinary research involves the examination of the built environments of slavery, that epic tragedy. From a methodological perspective that combines archival and on-site analysis, laboratory investigations of building materials and oral history. All of this comes together in a fascinating book project that I heard a piece of discussed in this room about a year ago on the Indian Ocean world titled Masters of the Land, Architecture, Slavery and Labor in Mauritius to which I believe his talk this evening adds or from I guess it's which it's excerpted. Currently in fact Dwight is working literally in and among the ruins in Mauritius, gathering the fragments I guess in that many many many way. In collaboration with his Amherst colleague, geologist Peter Crowley, to determine the chemical composition of samples of mortar, plaster, quarrel, stone and wooden flooring taken from 18th century Mauritian buildings. During the results with archival information on the skills that enslaved people possessed in masonry woodworking and coral smithing, he aims to develop a natural resource history of Mauritian architecture, this is the affirmative. A history of the island that accounts for the ways in which architectural knowledge and labor rendered slaves, as he puts it, quote, I love this phrase, the mavens of the land, the masters of a vast island that only they understood. Since Mauritius does not have a native population, the means through which, and maybe you'll introduce this, but I'm just for framing, the means by, since they don't have a native population, the means through which slaves from Madagascar, West Africa, India and East Africa became masters of the land, slaves become masters, suggests that they indigenized themselves, a fascinating concept, or made themselves a de facto native population through cultivating a form of local knowledge that positioned them as the only group in world history, in fact, history, history is angel, to have ever made use of the resources of this once unclaimed land. So, Cary's work thereby interrogates the meaning of indigenity, the limits of colonialism and the role that architecture can play in opening up discussion on these issues. Tonight, that discussion of recognition, and in this case, even a role reversal from, in other words, slave to master, if not, you know, we don't know, exactly repair, begins with the 14th annual Detlef Merton's lecture presented to us now by Dwight Carey under the title, Architecture, Landscape and Labor on a Strategic Atoll, Diego Garcia in the Past and Present. So, thank you, Reinhold, for that introduction. And thank you all for coming. It really is great to be here. So, today I'm going to present something that is an excerpt from that book project. It's a little bit different, but you'll see it's about Diego Garcia. And so, here is the talk, Architecture, Landscape and Labor on a Strategic Atoll, Diego Garcia in the Past and Present. So, I will begin. From the perspective of architectural studies, the Indian Ocean Island of Diego Garcia may seem unreachable. That would not be an unfounded assumption. It is nearly impossible to study Diego Garcia through the methods of fieldwork or visual analysis, located about 1,350 miles northeast of the post-colonial island nation of Mauritius. Diego Garcia is a 12-square-mile coral atoll that lies about 1,100 miles southwest of India. As the largest landmass in the Shigos archipelago, Diego Garcia is one of a smattering of 60 small atolls. Today, the island houses a notorious U.S. naval and air force base that purportedly boasts one of the many secret prisons where military personnel torture suspected jihadists. Only approved members of the American or British military can visit Diego Garcia, and even the island's former inhabitants can no longer set foot on this now notorious island. When erecting a military base from 1968 to 1973, the United States conspired with British colonizers to evict all 2,000 inhabitants from the entire archipelago of the Shigos Islands. The reasoning was that although Diego Garcia held strategic importance for Anglo-American special forces, the remote atoll was otherwise insignificant. According to the military's logic, the local inhabitants who all descend from 18th century enslaved laborers had done little to illustrate why their island mattered in the grand scope of world history. With these ideas solidified, the British and the American governments then deported all Shigosians to Mauritius and Seychelles, two countries where many of their 21st century descendants now live in poverty. In fact, one of the conditions of independence for the Republic of Mauritius was that the former British colony would be required to give citizenship to all of the evicted residents of the Shigos Islands. What remains of the traditional landscapes that these inhabitants left behind is largely unknown since even they cannot return to their old homes. Too often, architectural historians have shied away from such places, communities, and histories. Since we cannot go to Diego Garcia, and since the traditional architecture of the island has been all but destroyed, the implication would be that the atoll is out of bounds for architectural studies. Even a Google Maps view of this secretive island elicits images of military encampments, airport runways, and mess halls, hardly the vernacular structures that could give us an idea of the traditional architecture that once existed. Likewise, an examination of the scholarship on this island indicates that the study of Diego Garcia is largely the province of anthropologists, people who have interviewed the evicted residents in order to understand what their old home means to them as they live in diaspora today. This paper argues for an architectural studies approach to Diego Garcia. Usually, when architectural historians define the world historical value of a site, they do so through an engagement of standing or excavated edifices. We cannot do that on Diego Garcia. Nevertheless, if we read with and against the colonial archive, we can mine histories of enslaved expertise that show how Shagosian people have rendered this remote island a part of world history. This effort matters today as the islands and their former inhabitants face a post-colonial future that may even result in resettlement. To speak to the concerns of heritage and belonging in this emerging post-colonial context, we can embrace an approach that goes beyond the analysis of buildings. After all, the American military has nearly obliterated all of the historic architecture. Recognizing this loss, we can embrace the textual side of the architectural archive rather than its visual manifestations. We have almost no information on what the historic buildings of Diego Garcia looked like in their time. Instead, what we can find is a history of colonial labor made by the enslaved East African and Malagazi workers whose linguistic knowledge and ecological skills rendered settlement possible in the first place. This paper considers this body of information as an architectural history, showcasing a narrative where individual experiences of expertise in labor come out of a colonial archive. This paper thinks through what it would mean to consider the intellectual and ideational lives of enslaved people as the basis for our engagement of colonial sites. Usually, when enslaved labor surfaces in architectural histories of the colonial past, the work that captives perform to raise imperial edifices comes through in the form of generalized descriptions of the traditional knowledge that we can associate with the places where enslaved people come from. Crealization, or the large-scale blending of diverse typologies, often takes the center stage. Rarely do individual people their specific knowledge worlds and their unique experiences surface on the page. That is not the case in neighboring disciplines. Historian Jennifer Mard Morgan has explored how the process of mining the archive for narratives of black intimacy can reveal the individual ideas and desires of enslaved women in the Atlantic world. In Indian Ocean Studies, Alicia Schreiker and Nira Washakonga have recently published work that thinks through the role that a critical reading of the colonial archive can play in challenging stereotypes about enslaved people and their descendants. Perhaps they reason a reexamination of slavery that focuses on individual knowledge and experience can transform contemporary assumptions about both groups. This paper applies a similar approach to the realm of building construction, a field that I define as encompassing all of the work that enslaved people undertook to create a livable world. Hardly a domain that solely describes buildings in isolation, construction, I argue, is a broader field that includes the linguistic knowledge, communication, settlement, and production. Redefining construction in this way could bring a more diverse set of experiences and stories into our discussions of the built past. And as we present these stories in a world of wide-ranging militarism and displacement, we could even consider how such knowledge matters for marginalized communities like the Shagosian populations of Diego Garcia today. The archive of construction expertise could hold the key to exlocating a history of traditional knowledge in a context where western militaries and governments have long denied the legitimacy of Shagosian claims to the land. Perhaps this construction archive could even begin to frame our investigation of other militarized locales. In the Indian Ocean world, the challenges that Shagosian people face grow out of colonization. The United States became interested in Diego Garcia because they saw the island as a strategic launch site for aeronautical incursions into the Middle East and South Asia. The French and later British colonizers of earlier eras had similar dreams of using Diego Garcia as a way station for trade with India and China. Uninhabited for most of human time, Diego Garcia entered into the historical record in a rather innocuous way. Portuguese explorers named the island and mentioned it in their ship logs after visiting briefly in the 16th century. The Shagos Islands, however, remained unclaimed for another 200 years. In the 1780s, the French set their sights on Diego Garcia. They hoped to grow bananas, sweet potatoes, millet, women's and coconuts on the atoll. Small ships could easily disembark on the sandy beaches and tropical produce could fetch a high price on the world market. When describing Diego Garcia in the late 18th century, one figure summarized why colonizers found the island to be so alluring. He is worth quoting at length. This island in the sun is only made of sand piled on top of coral and rock meant for making lime wash and is covered in wood and a tremendous quantity of coconut palms and forms in its design a unique port that could contain shelter from the winds. Beside the coconut palms, the island is abundant in fish, sea turtles, crawfish and the sea. You can find good quality water in a swamp on a point on the western side of the island and also in a well that I made on the same coast. There are no reptiles, no venomous insects, and the only four-legged creatures are the small rats that will soon be eradicated by the cats that I left on the island. And this is actually releasing cats as a way to reduce rat populations was done quite widely across Indian Ocean islands at this time. This man sought to enhance this island in the sun, but in fact he ended up hastening environmental change by modifying the terrain and freeing cats and invasive species. Ecological degradation would continue as the French brought pigs and cattle in the coming years. Land modification would only work colonizer's reason if they, quote, introduced a large number of blacks, as one official noted. In October of 1784, 22 enslaved men, three enslaved women, and four enslaved children from Mauritius landed on Diego Garcia. Working under a white supervisor, these captives raised, quote, a beautiful house, end quote for the head administrator officials noted without saying more. Enslaved workers also built several service buildings and sheds for invasive pigs, chickens, and goats before establishing workshops for processing coconut oil. Colonizers also stood by as they cleared some of the island's native, and have hazardly growing coconut palms in order to make way for more regularly planted rows. The buildings these labors constructed were made of a total of 35 planks of wood that enslaved carpenters cut and loaded onto ships that came directly from Mauritius. Measuring out at 12 feet in width, 1.6 inches in thickness and 24 feet in length, these planks were already primed to render the earliest structures on Diego Garcia the distant copies of the wooden buildings on Mauritius, a much larger yet still distant land. By 1784, one of the enslaved workers who authorities sent to Diego Garcia had begun to make a name for himself. He was Jody Kerl, an enslaved man who authorities described as, quote, a black Mozambican who speaks very good French, end quote. Under the gaze of the island's overlords, he rose to become the commander of the Bond's people who were responsible for cultivating coconut palms and producing coconut oil. That is all that we know about Jody Kerl. Even though the historical record does not give us any other clues about his life, we can still see that he was a complicated person. He was likely a polyglot. His French overseers praised him in a way that they hardly ever commended enslaved people. Rarely did French colonizers describe the spoken French of the enslaved as, quote, very good. It is likely that Jody Kerl learned French in Mauritius when working as an enslaved man. It is even more likely that French was not the only language that he spoke proficiently. Hailing from East Africa, Jody Kerl may have spoken Portuguese Swahili Creole and several other African languages. Such skills clearly grew out of a life defined by what Roshana Johnson describes as a bound cosmopolitan status. Or an identity forge as an enslaved person becomes proficient in the languages and cultures of a diverse world as they move as a captive between regions and continents. Born somewhere in eastern Africa before transiting through Mozambique and having resided on Mauritius and also Diego Garcia, Jody Kerl was certainly a captive cosmopolitan. He was also an enslaved man who knew how to survive. By the time he entered into the historical record on Diego Garcia, he had already learned how to manage the labor of others. Jody Kerl had become an overseer of architectural and agricultural labor in his own right. That made him someone who most likely inflicted violence upon other enslaved people. Bound overseers like him often beat captives when they did not meet the demands placed upon them, and they were also responsible for inflicting sexual violence. And while the colonial archive offers no information on who Jody Kerl likely brutalized when he worked as a commander, he nonetheless assumed that he may have felt an affinity towards some French authorities. He must have spent at least some time around them in order to gain a mastery of the French language, mastery that led a colonizer to praise his linguistic skills. And that is exactly why he was undoubtedly a victim of violence. Having spent his life transiting in bondage across the Indian Ocean world, and having worked with French officials as an enslaved man, he withstood the physical, psychological, and emotional abuse that came with being a black person in the presence of white slave owners. His ability to speak French so well was likely a survival mechanism, something that he picked up so that he could maneuver his way through the violent, racist, and manipulative world of French colonialism. Being able to speak French gave him the ability to express his thoughts, feelings, and ideas to people who had power over him. French language proficiency also helped him understand his overseers, listen to their conversations, and better anticipate their next moves. Through listening, speaking, and comprehending, Jody Kerl could enact his own agenda within a racist system. Maybe such maneuvers were exactly what helped him become a commander on Diego Garcia. Maybe he was able to ever so subversively impress his overlords and give them the idea that he was the perfect person to lead other enslaved people on this remote island. Standing out as a black man from Mozambique who spoke very good French, Jody Kerl signaled that he was a polygot, a cosmopolitan captive, a man with ties to Mauritius, and a man who was set to be a leader on Diego Garcia. None of these qualities were enough to quell his suffering. As complex as Jody Kerl's life was, it was still a life lived in bondage. He struggled under the weight of slavery and he withstood the same forms of violence as the enslaved people, of many of the enslaved people he oversaw. Suffering and pain were unavoidable for all enslaved people, even those who had some degree of status and lived deep in the most remote corners of the Indian Ocean world. As always, production grew out of violence. Under the threat of punishment, the bonds people who worked under Jody Kerl's authority manufactured 12 barrels worth of coconut oil which sold for around 8,000 leaves on Mauritius in 1784. Coconut oil was a source of fuel, a food additive and a component in soap. And it rendered Diego Garcia profitable for the first time in history. But with only one surgeon and two nurses there to treat captives, the island was yet another place where forced laborers such as the only pregnant woman among the first group of enslaved inhabitants suffered from inadequate medical care. Merely listed as pregnant with no other information supplied on her age, origins or expertise, the enslaved woman who was about to give birth formed coconuts until the final days of gestation. Given that access to midwives doctors or a community of other enslaved women who had given birth under similar circumstances was exceedingly limited on Diego Garcia, it is likely that both she and her child died in labor. Without knowing who this woman was or what she experienced, we can only confirm that she lived in pain within a brutally overworked labor force. Life was excruciating for her just as it was hard for all of the other enslaved people on this remote island. That the enslaved produced anything, let alone 8,000 leaves worth of coconut oil was remarkable, so much so that M. Sviak reported that all of the work is proceeding actively on Diego Garcia as of 1784. Later that year, the island yielded massive catches of fish and some enslaved workers even slaughtered enough of the invasive cattle to yield several cuts of meat. These returns revealed just how much the diverse population of enslaved women, men and children understood the nuances of tropical cultivation. Although Diego Garcia had an equatorial climate that contrasted with the subtropical weather of the much more southerly and temperate Mauritius, the island was more similar to Mauritius than it was to France, the land that colonizers were most familiar with. Most of the enslaved labors had seen dozens of tropical and subtropical ports in their lifetimes. Many of them had likely experienced bondage in East Africa, Madagascar or India and all of them had lived on Mauritius. They were not environmental novices there to release invasive species on a previously uninhabited landmass. Instead, their agenda was one of survival and that gave them much in common with Joliqueur and like this man, the enslaved people who yielded the first crops on Diego Garcia applied knowledge from across the waters in this new world. In the process, they became the first generation of inhabitants on Diego Garcia bringing their expertise with them. Many people from Mauritius ensured that the atal was well on its way to becoming a strategic Indian Ocean node. It is this obscured yet strategic geography that initially attracted European colonizers and later the United States military. More than a history of military occupation, however, the accounts of ecological and linguistic knowledge that come out of the colonial archive matter as Diego Garcia and the rest of the Shagos Islands barrel into the future. On October 12th, 2023, Numericien, the main newspaper in Mauritius, reported that representatives from the Shagos Refugees Group and also the Prime Minister of Mauritius Pravi Jagna spent the better part of 2023 involved in high level negotiations with the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States. The goal was to negotiate, quote, the perfect post-colonial solution, end quote, to Shagosian displacement. Under the terms of a provisional agreement, the U.S. military would hold on to its base at Diego Garcia and in turn allow Shagosian refugees to resettle the remaining islands of the Shagos Archipelago. All of these small atals saved for the military base of Diego Garcia would then become the territory of Mauritius and that country would in turn facilitate the development of a luxury ecotourism industry that would provide jobs for resettled Shagosians. Fishing, shipping, and the exploitation of rare earth minerals would round out the economy. It is tourism, however, that will likely become the dominant industry. On these tropical islands in the middle of the Indian Ocean, plush resorts with overwater bungalows, infinity pools, and manicured beaches would likely replace the coconut groves that lie strewn across remote landscapes. Luxury tourism, that is, in the eyes of the British and the American governments, the Mauritian and the prime minister's office of Mauritius, quote, the perfect post-colonial solution. Luxury tourism. In our neoliberal age, this outcome seems so predictable, logical, and almost entirely inevitable. How could this land of beaches, lagoons, and palm trees not become yet another destination for the international elite? People who would undoubtedly pay thousands of dollars to vacation on islands that few civilians in the global north could even locate on a map. As beach tourism is likely to become a source of income and the impetus for resettlement on these atolls, it is entirely possible that the cultural heritage of these islands will remain obscured. Decades of military testing and development have taken a toll on the homes, docks, shrines, and plots that once existed, while also obliterating nearly every edifice from the era of trans-cultural slavery. As the Shagos Islands face this predicament, architectural studies can speak to the concerns of heritage and cultural belonging on these remote atolls. Shagosians have a connection to the land, a place in world history, and a tradition of complex, of cosmopolitan knowledge that relates to this landmass. Alongside our efforts to excavate the beaches, coconut groves, and shrub lands of the Shagos Islands to find examples of historic edifices, we could embrace the accounts of enslaved expertise that lie in the architectural archive. Written histories can give us a way of engaging the networks of knowledge, expertise, and belonging that have shaped Shagosian settlement. The region already has a range of local groups that architectural historians could collaborate with, learn from, and engage. Le Mauricien, the main newspaper on the island where most Shagosian refugees now live, regularly publishes reports on Mauritian architecture and history. Likewise, the newly opened Intercontinental Museum of Slavery in the Mauritian capital of Port Louis intends to tell the story of Indian Ocean enslavement and settlement writ large. And since all education is public and Mauritious, we can certainly work with Mauritian educators to integrate scholarship on the history of Diego Garcia into school curricula for diverse groups of students. And in doing so, we would need to consider construction labour as opposed to architectural styles, standing buildings, and formal typologies. Labour and construction cry out from the architectural archive in a context where standing historical remnants are few and far between. And forging a reconfigured field of displacement and contests the denial of Shagosian expertise and claims to the land, we could work with local communities to rethink the politics of marginalization and belonging on Diego Garcia and around the world. Thank you. So, essentially, I'm interested in Diego Garcia because, as I said in the talk, most of the research is in the field of anthropology and so it's heavily contemporary. The contemporary military history. And really, I came across this set of documents in the French colonial archives in France that dealt with the initial settlement of the island. And so, basically, what that set of materials is, it's a series of documents detailing, you know, the initial settlement and the enslaved people who were brought there. And so, of course, most of the document goes into this colonial history of introducing invasive species and so forth. You know, not just cats, but all of the other tropical produce that they wanted to farm there. But I think, you know, as far as what we know about initial settlement, right, this archive doesn't really have much in the way of descriptions of what buildings were like, right? We know that, yes, enslaved people in Mauritius cut the wood that was then used to be taken to the island. So the early architecture was similar to the kind of architecture that you would find in Mauritius and other colonial locales. But really beyond that, there are no descriptions of the buildings. There are more descriptions of the landscape, but also of labor. And so this grows out of a broader concern that I have and that when I started working on this project on architecture in the Indian Ocean world, I was a bit frustrated at first because I kept on thinking, okay, what did these buildings look like? You know, what were they like? And you find almost no information in the archive on how the buildings appeared, but what you find is information on labor and materials. And then it took a while for me to realize, uh-huh, that is the history. That is what this is noteworthy for. And I think, at least for me, thinking about what the Shigos Islands mean today, this notion that the islands were somehow insignificant, I think this history of labor can work against that narrative. And of course I recognize that you know, it's not my place to say how people in the Shigos, who are Shigosian, should deal with this information. I think though it means that architectural historians can at least approach this site and think about it, and think about the primary sources in new ways, perhaps in this more textual way that takes us into the realm of labor and environmental damage. Yeah, and a lot of the in terms of the documents, it's a lot of narrative descriptions, literally accounts of so it is textual, it is a story. Definitely, yeah. You know, while we're gathering more, one of my questions actually is related to this, the museum, it seemed that the architecture of that building you know, and I suppose the way it's been articulated when they renovated, reflects something of its making in this kind of you know, something that could be considered stylistically mannerist or something, the articulation of the stonework. But you know, in that rustication, presumably reflects the labor that you're describing. Do you know, has that been documented or does it belong on the ledger? Yeah, so actually in another part of my book, I talk about that very building, that building actually comes up a lot in my book. It's an old military hospital that was built in 1745 by a very diverse group of enslaved people, and so there actually are documents from that era that describe the extraction of coral, and so really what the building is is you have these blocks of coral that have been extracted by divers who literally cut the coral off of the reef, and then the black blocks, yeah, the black blocks and then formed into these blocks and then there's also a set of materials that talk about the actual creation of the mortar from coral and beach sand as well. So again, even in the archive of that structure, you know, you don't get information on the stylistic intent, but what you really find is this history of labor and extraction. Is that what you're doing with your colleague in geology? Yeah, so that's what we had been doing. We were working on that building, and so but another point that I think it relates to this broader discussion is that there are only seven buildings from the era of trans-cultural slavery on Mauritius, and that building that I showed is the most intact one. Most of these structures are ruins, right? They're not really even buildings at all anymore. All right. More coral. Thank you very much. Sorry. Well, you're clearly working with the textual material that you find in the archive, and you're presenting us the limitations of the archive and also the governmental limitations on accessing the site. I was intrigued considering those things and without going into the realm of speculation I presumed that as this island became settled some of that knowledge that was in Mauritius transferred with it. Is there anything from I guess my first question is are there other islands in which knowledge got moved in similar ways, in which expertise construction expertise or technologies that you can if not find a parallel find some insight on what they saw within Mauritius to transport to other parts of nearby archipelagos. Yeah, that's a really great question. I mean, and there are two parts really to the answer. On one level with Diego Garcia the 18th century archive for that island is extremely limited, so that batch of materials in the French colonial archives it's really the only batch of materials on the earliest years of settlement. So 18 or 1784 up until 1810 when the island was then switched over to British control. What I will say though is that you do find information in the archive on Rodrigue, so here I guess I'll point it out where Rodrigue is Uh oh. Oh, we get to pull up the map. Okay, so then I'll have to go all the way back. Let's see. Okay, so interestingly enough Rodrigue doesn't show up or actually it shows up. Rodrigue is a very tiny island located right here. It's about 385 miles east of Mauritius northeast of Mauritius and so interestingly enough Rodrigue is similar to Diego Garcia and that it was populated by enslaved people from Mauritius. So mostly enslaved people from Madagascar and East Africa broadly conceived and so there is information in the architectural archive on the settlement of Mauritius and in fact what we know is that the same processes of coral extraction, right to create mortar were applied on Rodrigue so there is this way in which Mauritius even though it's an island the size of Rhode Island in the United States it's very small, there still is, it does act as a point of diffusion in this broader Indian Ocean world. So islands like Rodrigue, Diego Garcia and the Shigos Archipelago also another outlying atol known as Agalaga Island these are places where the material knowledge that enslaved people developed on Mauritius and brought with them of course from other places ends up being spread to those landscapes as well and an interesting point is that all of these landscapes Agalaga Island, Rodrigue, Diego Garcia today they're actually a very important strategic and military importance. So for instance Agalaga Island is a place that has in recent years really in the past few months what people who live on the island have noticed is that there is this Indian development firm that has moved in and started developing this massive port infrastructure on their homeland they're not being told what's happening and so what people suspect is that basically the Indian military is developing this island into a site like Diego Garcia and so what everyone fears is that people who live on Agalaga are going to be evicted much like Shagosian people years ago so there is this way that these outlying islands were sources of the export of slave labor, coconut farming and then now in this geopolitical age of the Indo-Pacific being a strategic node they're turning into militarized sites. In the earlier studies that you studied is there evidence of slave revolt? Yeah, so that's a good question I was talking before this lecture about the 17th century in Mauritius so the thing about Mauritius is that it was uninhabited until 1638 it was a Dutch colony from 1638 to 1710 a French colony 1715 to 1810 a British colony 1810 to 1968 and then it became an independent nation so there is evidence there was a slave revolt that happened in the 17th century under the Dutch rule yeah and really in the French period there were various revolts but nothing on the order that you see in say Haiti or Guadeloupe I think I'm probably not the only one who's looking at essentially the plan of the island which is not you know an island it's an atoll so it's this incredible linear circumference that so Jolique is this like the French name given pretty heart that's what beautiful heart is so beautiful heart the commander whose job it is to prevent right? would have had to command that island and his colleagues I guess in a very specific way because you can imagine it's so unusual geographically the strip that it could be tactically kind of occupied in a manner that somebody must have calculated how many commanders you need and who commands the commander such that they don't themselves join their fellow slaves in revolt do you know anything about that dynamic interesting I'll go back to the map let's see so basically this is an aerial photograph of Diego Garcia today you could see the US military airstrip right there and so that this part of the island is really the area where all of the military activity takes place that was in the past where coconut farming took place so literally the American military infrastructure has been built on top of the old area of settlement the other aspects of the island so from here into here and so really the other parts of the island were remote right because of course these thin strips of land you can't really farm much on there but of course I'm bringing that up because I think it's important to really conceptualize how confining the space would have been it's a very small island and it's a broader issue that I think comes up a lot in Indian Ocean studies we often times talk about the Indian Ocean as being this broadly cosmopolitan space there's a lot of trans-oceanic cultural flow and I think that's true but I also think it's important to recognize how confining it would have been and so really it's about confinement I would say yeah thank you so much for your talk and just kind of reflecting on these islands that people called the confetti of empire and how they were always swapping one conquering the other and also swapping some of the same the Europeans conquering each other and also swapping so many and circulating so many of the same kinds of programs and how that continues now whether it was penal colonies or plantations or now ports and black sites and tax havens and resorts the same kind of movement and circulation in these islands but I also thinking about because of all of that movement and often I'm so curious about this work on construction technology because I know there's a chance that one can see how Europeans building in some of these places had a kind of arrogance about their construction technology they would build only in fire brick even though they made them much hotter but then some of them started using the kind of mixtures techniques that were had been used in indigenous dwellings and so on mixing with the concrete like straw or something in the straw would absorb the humidity so in ways that you couldn't see there's nothing about looking at the building which would tell you anything about its performance but I'm wondering if in all this circulation you're seeing some of the kinds of mixtures eventually or if that construction technology is a reflection of colonial arrogance that's a good point I think it really leads us back to Madagascar because of course Madagascar has this long history of wooden construction and so most enslaved people who ended up on Mauritius and then from there Diego Garcia and Rodrig were people who came from Madagascar and so effectively there is this way that when you look at the historical record in the prevalence of carpentry effectively you can trace that knowledge back really to eastern Madagascar and vernacular construction there and I also think that what you find is that oftentimes it's not necessarily that certain groups of enslaved people were prioritized because they came from places with histories of wooden construction it's not that Malagazi slaves were only used to build in wood effectively I think there's this doubly relevant process that's happening where people are bringing skills that they have from their homelands with them and they're passed down generationally in the culture of the workshop but then also at the same time there's this reality of adaptation so that someone who worked with wood in Madagascar and is working with that is also interacting with people who work with coral and so these new technologies and new ways of understanding this new world are combined with this transfer of traditional knowledge from other places thanks for the very beautiful talk and the thinking within it and beyond it I was thinking towards the end that it would be incredibly disappointing to suddenly find out about the buildings that you're researching in other words that the the more conventional as it were target of a kind of form function etc is is the more research you do the less relevant and somehow this subtle and almost sort of negative research like a history of erasure so not even not even to find the materials that have been erased but to sort of a kind of traces of erasure and then slavery is much more the thing the object let's say rather than a kind of building so I thought the work is sort of very very is a very sort of strong way to rethink historiography in general because let's say rather than understand this as a kind of research into a kind of fugitivity where actual fugitivity is the sort of name of the game way of rethinking what happens when somebody does have a building in front of them and does the research where what is forgotten is for example slavery and so so in a sense I see the work as as kind of just opening up a kind of alternative way of of trying not to see buildings in order to see what it is that they hide or and I think in a sense I learn almost amount from you the sort of white lotus ending that there would be this sort of tourist resort and so on seems to me fits into the the kind of extractive archaeology that Keller was just referring to and almost so I almost think the kind of project to come what do they call it the perfect future is somehow in such an intimate relationship with this fugitivity and surely this hotel and it's new form of new forms of slavery or echoes of will tend to kind of mask your research if I kind of imagine you scurrying around the islands before the next wave arrives the next kind of military camp in the form of tourism looking for these layers I'm repeating myself but just out of affection for the work I think it's really eloquent and reminds me how boring it is most writing about most historiography when there is just so much evidence when there's a kind of maybe start to discuss the privilege of evidence you know what I mean yeah I mean thank you for your comments I mean it's really the reason why I went in this direction is because of a lot of my discomfort with the way in which historic preservation operates in Mauritius today because in Mauritius you know the population there's a white minority about 2% of the population about 3% of the population is Chinese and then Indian Indo-Mauritians comprise around like 68% of the population and then descendants of enslaved people around 27% or so and so in Mauritius generally historic preservation is the province of the white minority and the reason is because in Mauritius, Mauritian history is a history of colonization a lot of people in Mauritius who are not white who are descended from Indian indentured laborers or enslaved people see the historic architecture as a remnant of a passive brutalization right that's something that the island wants to move away from and so the racial politics of the island are such that in the architectural field preservation is oftentimes a privilege that while we the white merchants are the guardians of the true history of this island the people in power Indo-Mauritians and descendants of slaves they have no respect for history and so knowing that also white Mauritians are the predominant drivers of the tourism industry which is 30% of the economy the fact that this plan for the perfect post-colonial solution as they call it in those islands to be developed as a tourist site to me it seems very likely right that essentially what will happen is that any excavated architectural history from the Arab slavery will be something that is done and then packaged into the tourism industry to yield dividends for this already wealthy population and so I think that by looking at this textual narrative from happening completely obviously but I think it could provide another way forward where an architectural historians and preservationists don't always align with and justify their work in a way that fits into this neoliberal industry is that who is running the museum? so actually interestingly enough the answer is no and so the museum was an effort that was created out of a within reconciliation commission that was established in the 1990s and so I talk about this in the book but effectively it was a creole led or initiative led by descendants of slaves to create a museum of slavery on the island so but of course one of the justifications for the museum was that well it'll bring in greater revenue through tourism so it always circles back to that in this post-colonial tropical island context can I also ask you maybe it follows on from some of the other questions first thank you for your beautiful talk I was really struck by this great formulation of Diego Garcia being an island unreachable or almost unreachable through architectural history and the turn you make to sort of redefining construction as a broader category and ending on this question or maybe you brought it up that labor and materials become the domain of history and so there's like on so many levels sort of indictment on certain absences within architectural histories like sites of investigation but I'm wondering what happens then with the methodological framework that produces if you do come across something like a more conventional archive or a cache of what would happen if or maybe in the book what happens not because we would return to something more conventional in terms of the tools and methods of an architectural historian but I want to think about once you push certain questions into a sort of fantastic new domain what sort of weapon does that give you back on to more conventional objects or let's say archives with more visual material like how then would you how then would you rewrite those also would they become reachable again or would they remain unreachable I'm sort of interested in in the type of methodological sort of refraction that you seem to set up as a potential yeah thank you that's an interesting question I think that in many respects when thinking of how this method can be if I'm understanding correctly you're thinking of how this method can be applied in more conventional context or in a context where you have actual brown plans or an archive yeah I mean so yeah I think that it could remain intact in so far as the element of labor is something that I think needs to remain because what worries me is that a lot of times in this architectural history of enslavement and of colonization writ large the actual labor and not just the fact that okay there were this many laborers who constructed the structure they came from these places more so I think that what is missing oftentimes is this ideational world or this world where we try to think about laborers not just as individuals who exist as numbers or even as meditans for a particular connection to a stylistic tradition from a particular place but as people who were complicated and who had affinity to colonizers they were victims of violence they inflicted violence and I think that more complex role of labor is something that I think should be extracted across the board in the discipline so and that's why I brought in Jennifer Morgan's work I mean she is you know I know she's a historian but I think that way of thinking about enslavement as existing as something that's not just in terms of production itself but also ideas and feelings and affinities could be very useful especially on this archive I was what I was maybe I think this adds wondering about was okay also these analytical categories that you've introduced you you know for example Jody Kerr is an enslave cosmopolitan which you know goes in the direction that you were just describing there's also I think maybe more running in the background here and then the principle which I think is extremely suggestive and difficult of a kind of modern indigeneity in other words that were kind of produced you know you had this beautiful at the beginning of your talk for most of human history these islands are uninhabited and then somebody comes and in a sense becomes indigenous in a way that as historians because history of course is a modern concept you know can be reconstructed you know with all the methodological caveats and contradictions that you guys are discussing such that we can then come to terms with a kind of indigeneity that is yet not indigenous in this sort of primordial sense so you know that seems like also a kind of portable concept in the way that Felicity is asking I don't know if you want to know Yeah that's an interesting point because this case actually defines the ocean at large because Mauritius has no indigenous population also neither does Rayon Island neither do the Seychelles not Diego Garcia Rodriguez so this applies across the island context of the region and so it is interesting right this modern concept of indigeneity that actually comes up in a lot of shagosian activism today because there is a group of shagosian activists in London who are planning to petition the United Nations for shagosian people to be registered as an indigenous population that's of course controversial because other communities believe of shagosians think that that might take away from their claim to say Mauritian citizenship or Seychelles citizenship and so it's a controversial topic one thing I do in the book I move away from being very definitive about whether this is an indigenous population or not I think it's something that is up for debate as you say but I think it's something that is a way that this part of the world is distinct from say the Caribbean which it's often compared to Thank you Dwight for the talk I was thinking I was really struck by one of the things you said which is what does it mean to know how to survive and you know it was such an interesting story that we talked about architecture I think not all architecture of course but certain kinds of architecture that survive and that becomes the only archive we have but what has then survived is something that you need to access in between you know anthropology sociology like it's not that but it's also not the kind of archival methodology and so it then made me think about subaltern studies and you know that kind of lineage of how to access the voices that are not in the archive and I was thinking about particularly about speedax telio voices you know because I think there's some of that there when you try to capture especially the life of this woman who was pregnant who was trying to access you know so what might have been that ideational world or that inner world of that experience but at the same time a lot of your references methodological ones come from you know the Atlantic world of the history enslaved people and so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that intersection of those two methodologies somewhere between postcolonial and you know African American studies and how you've developed something in between there which also speaks to that kind of Indian ocean status of being in between you know neither that nor I mean it's interesting because yes you know people like Jennifer Morgan come out of the Atlantic context of course even the notion of creolization is highly developed in Caribbean studies but I think it's true that in and I think this is a controversy in Indian ocean studies right there is this tendency that okay we want to always articulate ourselves against the Caribbean but the Caribbean is unavoidable at least from a methodological perspective because of the continuities and so I would say that effectively methodologically one way that the Indian ocean is distinct at least from a material perspective is that you don't really on Mauritius have the traces of the architecture of enslavement that you find in the Atlantic context so there are no fortresses of the slave trade there are no plantations from the era of trans cultural slavery largely because Mauritius was not a plantation colony in the 18th century but I think that's significant in that you know it's not like say if you went to Barbados or Jamaica where you have the remnants of the sites of slavery there because the island was after slavery ended turned into this site of Indian indentured labor that history has been obliterated and so I think the methodological that actually does present this methodological or methodologically specific case and that I think is what makes this part of the world or that separates it or puts it in between as you say because I think that in you know the neighboring island of reunion or reunion it's a similar story right this is a place with no indigenous population there was a history of slavery a history of indenture not as extensive as on Mauritius but you even find this in Seychelles where these islands like Diego Garcia were not settled until very late 1780 and then there was this it was a history as it was used as a quarantine site then as a site for elite exiles in the British period but I think that at least in the context of Mauritius the obliteration of the architecture of trans-cultural slavery and the notion that there that descendants of slaves have nothing to really go to to see their heritage to find their heritage on the island I think that requires this distinct methodology that separates us from Caribbean studies and Atlantic studies Hi, thank you for a wonderful talk. I was struck by the somewhat humorous detail of the introduction of cats to the archipelago right as sort of foot soldiers for the preparation of those lands for further settlement and cultivation and apologies to any cat owners in the room but you know cats are notorious among environmentalists and conservationists for decimating bird populations right in various corners of the world and I'm just wondering if in this you know new method that you're developing in which you deprivilege traditional categories of architectural history like style, like form and typology and so forth you are providing space for certain non-human actors in their space making capacities and potentials right and if as part of this effort to recover these lost structures through archival sources and other textual sources if you are also aiming to perhaps recover some of the interspecies worlds that are lost to historical record so I have a great question what comes to mind immediately is coral Mauritius so Diego Garcia has a massive coral reef of course that has been decimated because of military development but also on Mauritius there's a fringing reef that surrounds the entire island and coral bleaching is a major problem on Mauritius but I bring up coral because of course in the 18th and 19th century the reef was subjected to massive destruction because effectively that was where people were directed to go to to mine the resources to create building blocks but also mortar and as far as the humorous details you know you find those details a lot in the Mauritian environmental history so there's this one case from the 1840s actually there's this French colonizer who becomes obsessed with how he believes that the coral reef is growing at an expeditious rate and so he says in his memoir you know every day I go out to the beach and I see that the coral has grown exponentially and it's just growing every single day every hour it's multiplying at this crazy rate like a plant and so then he orders for him to go out and cut the coral off of the reef to stop it from growing so quickly and so looking back on it you could see oh my god you know when I read this in the archive I thought this man is an idiot right like he thinks he's so smart he's using the techniques of scientific observation but then coming to this conclusion that results in massive environmental destruction but I think that as far as thinking of non-human actors I would say that coral you know is a character right in the book because it is this mechanism that is believed to be there to propel development right you cannot have immersion architecture of settlement without the coral reef without mortar from that reef you cannot have an immersion architecture it was believed without trees right the trees of the island which were then used to fire in the mortar production process and also in construction another thing is that this island Diego Garcia and the main island of Mauritius have been subjected to massive deforestation when people first arrived on Mauritius the vegetation was so thick that people found it difficult to even walk from the beach into the island because there were so many trees and and now if you look at pictures of Mauritius they're really basically Mauritius has lost about 90% of its forest cover so you have landscapes where basically expanses of trees have been replaced by sugarcane fields and so it's like a lot of Caribbean islands in that respect okay last question to Andres well this has been a fascinating talk I want to commend you for this because I find it really kind of connecting so many things and I also love the way that you delivered it because it was very kind of monotonous serious tone and there were moments that you would make a pose and kind of smile and I think that has to do also with these humorous moments like the cat and it was also the moment that you explained that this guy could speak French and that made him very different in the way he could articulate different worlds right and also you smile at the time that you were showing this image of the kind of palm trees and the white lotus thing right I think these three moments seem to be connected but still you didn't explicitly connect them somehow and if we take that actually there's two things that I think that might be behind this one is the archive I think that this ecosystem seems to be also your archive right like the ecosystem itself could be read as the archive of all these things that you're really mentioning the second thing is that I have the feeling that the fact that there's a person a slave person that kind of works positions himself in the threshold of enlightened notions of what three months could be and by speaking French and of course this island is a site where enlightenment in the Sylvia winter terms it's produced two colonization and the definition of what could be sacrifice and who could not be sacrifice is crucial it seems to be a site where what constitutes the human it's been defined right and the third I think it's the cut actually and the fact that rats could should be sacrificed and if we put all these things in connection seems that the white lotus is an ultimate evolution of all that short of a consequence of that right in a way wouldn't find rats in a white lotus we would find rats and definitely it's the so I wonder what it means because also we see that those are the images that would best circulate now and the bit because it seems that you're pointed to that right when you said luxury equal luxury you said and you smile seems that that's the ultimate place where colonization is working now and also the what could be sacrificed is being defined now that's an interesting point I didn't realize I guess on one level I think you know when I hear oh this is going to be redeveloped into a luxury tourism destination my first thought is oh of course you know and it's funny because when I teach this to my students and I show them photographs like you know this photograph here of the ecosystems that you find on the agilis or in the shagel silence it's not uncommon for one thing to say oh I want to go there for vacation right and so effectively I think you're right that this is the way in which this place has evolved but also the obliteration of landscapes prepares us for this moment that effectively the US military in the 1960s declared that this was an insignificant place this is a small population of people who have no connection to the outside world in the logic of the military their homes were destroyed and then you know this can be positioned as a reclaimed land and that we're going to try to rehabilitate the ecosystem through tourism and so I think that effectively that relates back to the questions of methodology for me because in this context of obliteration and then the prospect of even more obliteration as a result of the preparation of these islands for tourism it brings forth the question what can architectural historians do to speak to these processes and so maybe it is that we don't have to lean into the landscape always and talking about built histories that there is this other textual history that might take us away from this tendency to always think of these tropical island contexts as beautiful or alluring in some way for settlement okay I want to go to this island to see this restored structure that relates to the era of slavery and then of course when you're done right I think that's a model of understanding historic architecture and zones of slavery that has been perfected in the Caribbean context and so for me in the Indian Ocean world as a site of greater inquiry I think there's an opportunity to think of landscape and architecture and histories of slavery in another way that doesn't feed in Alright excellent let's thank once again Dwight Karen