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“On the Edge of Legibility: Architecture and its Peripheries” Symposium Paper Presentations

Fri, Apr 3, 2026 9am

In 1930, the Croatian art historian Ljubo Karaman theorized the “freedom of the periphery” as a highly dynamic space of syncretism and geopolitical interrelation. Karaman and his theories, though, have themselves remained peripheral to the Anglo-American academy, whose discourse on peripherality has been shaped largely by world-systems theories. In Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1974 The Modern World-System, for example, the globe is partitioned according to unidirectional exchanges between a core and periphery, and cultural hegemony is merely contingent on economic domination. Poet and thinker Édouard Glissant would reject such a reduction two decades later. Challenging the West’s empirical imperative to render the world legible and transparent, Glissant called for our “right to opacity,” wherein knowledges are entangled, irreducible, confluent, and relativized. Considering opacity as a precondition for cultural freedom, how can architectural historians engage the periphery on its own terms and with its own methods?

While easily conceived economically and geographically, we propose a lingering in the periphery, putting pressure on capitalist temporality and liberal epistemologies. While architectural historiography has treated the peripheral in diverse ways, what themes, events, sites, and actors remain at the edge of its discourse? How can architectural history imbricate itself in questions of the temporal and knowable? Recent turns to indigenous knowledge and post-secular reevaluations of modernity are starting points for re-interrogating the periphery. Aware of our position within the American academy, our ambition for this symposium is to foster dialogue on how we can attend to, uphold, research, study, and understand each other opaquely.