| dc.description.abstract | Political theorists concerned with enduring structural injustice often focus on the politics of the body, space, and knowledge. Yet, they do not always bring the body’s sensory experiences of physical space into their research design. This dissertation argues that political theory can and should focus on architecture, space, and the body’s sensory experience of the two for political theorizing on structural injustice, in its continuity between past, present, and future. Following political theorists who study inclusion, power, and structural injustice via ethnography, this dissertation develops a historical ethnography methodology for studying the dynamic of space and political thought in physical buildings that were fundamental to building racism, imperialism, and colonialism. The methodology is developed from a specific case, 18th century European forts used during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and uses grounded theory of the British slave-trading company archive, European fortification history, and site visits at historical architectures in Ghana. To attend to the epistemic centrality of space and the epistemic challenges of racism and empire to political theory and practice, and to do so with an aim towards a transformative politics of knowledge, the historical ethnographic method is guided by Toni Morrison’s rememory, Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation, and Ackerly et al. (2021) grounded normative theory (GNT). Bringing in rememory, critical fabulation, and GNT requires and offers a more well-directed path towards transformation of the researcher by engaging with the past through grounding research more directly in the following: physical space and architecture, bodily sensation caused by architecture or space, engagement in the creativity that unknowability offers, and place-based community for epistemic accountability. I find that while fortresses were lauded as technologies of security, they were an architecture that reproduced insecurity and the unending threat of war, all while institutionalizing racial and class difference. To counter lived experiences of insecurity, companymen within 18th century forts in West Africa used forts to project supremacy and create more stable categories of meaning. From historiography on enslaved peoples’ everyday and organized acts of resistance and defense across the Atlantic, I considered marginalized spaces of politics that political theory can continue to learn and theorize from. This should implore political theorists to give due attention to transient political spaces, rather than merely the lasting. This methodology contributes to the ways in which researchers engage in political community-building, including democratic mourning, in their research process via ethnographic methods. | |
