My book Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire is an invitation to shift our attention to small spaces. These are spaces that have long been considered insignificant because of their size or location or for the minor role they seemingly play in the larger social and political scene. Small spaces are simultaneously evident and elusive. They are lived spaces we don’t notice. They span and breach social classes and categories, sensations and materialities, deprivation and delight. As objects of inquiry, they demand that we ask what constitutes smallness.
Noticing small spaces in the archive and in our everyday lives is difficult. As has been said about infrastructure, we only notice infrastructure when something goes wrong: for example, we become cognizant of water infrastructure only when the faucet runs dry. Only in exceptional moments do small spaces surface in the dominant optical field, appearing as so many problems to be solved, subjects to discipline, punish, and reform. They are expected to remain contained, confined, and working. It is in working that they become invisible. In contrast, those who have to fetch water every day from a river or well, who do the working, are hardly unaware of the infrastructure’s affordances—the class, race, caste, religious lines that striate the landscape of everyday need. The latter appear in the archive when summoned for their recalcitrance and resistance.
Writing about long-neglected small spaces presents methodological difficulties. How do we recover traces that have been consigned to oblivion? How do we make sense of such traces when they are recovered or that shine through the chaos of the archive? We have a difficult time convincing others that small spaces and minor actors matter. Few believe they are important. Even when we concede their importance, we resist the notion that small spaces are “pivotal.” Few consider them paradigm-shifting.
The approach to small spaces I advocate requires us, in a fundamental sense, to unlearn habits of thinking about architecture and history—what matters and what counts as evidence. In my previous book, Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field, I made an argument that to unlearn the city we cannot begin with the dominant discourse as a framing or jumping-off point in a debate about urban infrastructure. We need to begin somewhere else, turning our attention to materialities that dis/connect and constitute communities. There my recourse to urban popular culture was a means to unlearn the term “infrastructure” and put it to a different descriptive task. In so doing, I made a case for looking at horizontal connections that link subaltern and elite practices, rather than assume a so-called bottom-up approach. The problem with a bottom-up approach is that it risks carrying over, depending upon, and replicating disciplinary prejudices while supposedly reversing the top-down approach.
While it is possible to locate and “uncover” hidden voices and narratives through ethnographic work to redress the absence of those voices that have been erased from the archive, these voices come no less unmediated than those from the dominant historical archive. Both require a practice of reading and behove us to honor silences as we archive and analyze.
The documents I assemble in my book from the archive of trade reports, advertisements, probate inventories, records of household expenses and lists of servants, memoirs, housekeeping guides and recipe books, pictorial evidence, photographs and architectural drawings are wide-ranging, but they are also decidedly one-sided, predominantly a product of the British and Indian educated class’s effort at documentation, recollection, and reform. My reading of this assembly purports to unarchive—by paying attention to the marginal spaces, that which is left over, refused, unacknowledged, and looking for the openings where the archival line of thought is strained by its banality and becomes too fragile to maintain a countenance of control, where it erupts in anger, frustration, and fear. Unarchiving is thus a form of disassembling: noticing, while unwinding, what might have been erased and left out in the process of archive-making, both intentionally or because some spaces and events thwart representation. The long list of commodities offered for sale in newspaper advertisements and notices in cities that connected Europe’s trade with Asia appear too banal for speculation. The minutiae about dusters and dishwashing that populate housekeeping guides obscure the regimes of labor that were pressed into the service of keeping white homes clean and white bodies comfortable. The descriptions of pickling fruits on terraces appear too minor to be worthy of architectural histories of empire.
Servants figure prominently in these records, but their utterances are noticeable in their sparseness. When their voices draw attention, it is because they are ventriloquized by the masters and mistresses as amusing episodes of the insufficient knowledge of the native population, or because they are deemed threatening. Such utterances mark the lines of difference, of an effort to sort relations of class, gender, and race. For the most part, these actors are unnamed. Their presence, however, is on record. As they are made into objects of gaze and speculation, they stand as accusations of empire. When I have found the names—the “boy” Turab Ali, already a grandfather, or Bhowany Bose, wine godown sircar, or Syfollah, bottlekhana sircar—I have heeded their names as spatial presence.
My practice of reading small spaces draws upon the work of James Deetz and Dell Upton, and begins with a commitment to question the very idea of smallness as it relates to the geography of empire. This means beginning with ordinary fragments of daily life, lading lists with their numbing routines and patterns, and not the large already always known territory that is empire.
In well-regarded memoirs penned by Indians, small spaces are seen as indulgent, ideological excesses of the self, tinged with the illicit. The authors all offer apologies for expending the reader’s attention on such indulgence. But they persist with their stories, and along the way speak of spaces in uncommon light: a rice field moving away with flood waters, a verandah that shields a desperately hungry woman from the inquisitive eyes of neighbors. Commonplace objects such as bookshelves and medicine cases become subjects of lengthy reflections, engendering spaces of loss and comfort.
The small spaces, as ordinary fragments, may or may not add up to any larger collective: but I am interested in where they do and with what they do or where the potential for extrapolation and speculation emerge. This means being alert to minor disturbances in routine, the anxious moment when things do not work as usual. It means being prepared for uneasy alliances, accidental overlaps, and not knowing. I have tried to reflect on the clusters of meaning that adhere to small spaces, stretching from the obvious, presumptive, resistant, and criminalized. These constitute a range of invocations in terms of scale, location, power, status, duration, visibility, portability, aberrance, and affect.
I scan these possibilities through a spatial reading approximating what Kathleen Stewart calls “slow looking”: paying attention to the ordinary everyday events and watch for their potentiality to emerge. I search for the unintended gaps in spatial articulation, accidental ruptures in the narrative, and brittleness in the material foundations of consumption, noticing the edges of the space, object, argument, where these lead and how they connect to and inscribe, often unwittingly, a larger geography, without being determinant.
There are no heroes or leaders in this story. Given the scattered specks of evidence in the historical archives, there is no unitary story line either. My strategy has been to refuse the attitude toward the archive that determines one moment of Europe’s or the British empire’s entry into the colonies or a defined exit point, hoping to at least set aside stories of unsullied pasts, glorious victories, and tainted presents. There have been multiple entries and exits, one more violent and rapacious than the other, and each entrée and exit renders a different complex world. And these entries and exits are not limited to the colonizers, just as there is no one way that these small spaces are registered, connected, operate. Their operation is as diverse as their form, use, location, historical specificity. My reading is guided by two features of the way small spaces appear in the archive: their seeming disconnectedness and a somewhat paradoxical similarity across empires and regions.
That is why this is not connected history. Rather, I propose to rethink connections by delinking the spaces of empire from their usual networks and rerouting them through other paths to help us see what the so-called fact of empire obscures. Delinking here borrows the strategic instinct of Samir Amin’s and Walter Mignolo’s theorizations—a refusal to be preoccupied by imperial formations. By delinking from empire, I do not mean we ought to (a) ignore the imbalance of power that constituted imperial enterprise; (b) assume that empires lacked decipherable structures or happened in “a fit of absence of mind”; and (c) focus on the ostensibly “local” rather than the translocal to claim some uncontaminated cultural essence. And it does not mean the recentering of empire via small spaces.
On the contrary, the project of delinking is premised upon the idea that global transactions transformed cultural practices at many scales, in the most intimate spaces and the most public arenas, in ways that we are just beginning to comprehend. Social and political boundaries are inherently porous. To understand the peculiar complexity of lifeworlds disrupted and engendered through colonialism, we must keep the edges of our temporal and spatial inquiry open.
I propose strategic delinking as an approach to inserting small spaces into the narrative of empire. I aim to not just disrupt the hegemonic accounts of production and consumption, but to refuse the assumption of empire as a geographical fact defined by a vastness of scale and a handful of agents. Strategic delinking refutes the idea that imperial spaces are temporally, physically, and categorically congruent. Strategic delinking constitutes seeing the small spaces of empire as sitting askew in relation to the dominant vectors of power, even when lodged within hegemonic contexts. Empire’s coherence is splintered by small spaces as fragments residing both within and outside dominant networks. Unarchiving leads us to these fragments, forcing us to rethink the taken-for-granted assumptions about space and architecture which we have unthinkingly, unwittingly adopted in our liberal posture of modernity. The three parts of my book, “Trade and Labor,” “Land Imagination,” and “A Geography of Small Spaces,” attempt to think smallness through three different approaches to scale, size, location, and materiality.
Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture, with an affiliated appointment in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA. She is a founding editor of PLATFORM.
The text of this blog post has been extracted from pages 3, 24-27 of Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire and edited to appear here with the author's permission.
Click here to read an unedited extract. Original chapter text by Swati Chattopadhyay.
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