When is architecture? What relations constitute it? These questions animate The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements. In it, Joseph Godlewski gives flesh and a different kind of weight to the Bight of Biafra harbour, known best for the horrors of its legendary ports in the centuries-long slave trade. Focusing on the eastern section of the coastal recess and up the Calabar River in Nigeria, Godlewski posits a history of a fragmented urban ecology, of mangrove forests entangled with a multiethnic emporium, where, ‘as middlemen in the slave and later palm oil trades, the Èfik people of Old Calabar… and the spaces they coproduced were central to the construction of a global modernity’ (p. 7). The book is organised around driving themes that exert gravitational pull in a variety of disciplines: a concern with the narratives and discourses of African urbanism, with ephemeral and unfixed architecture, with space operating as the site for a spatially unbounded sociality while also more than a social container, and with built environments of Blackness and racialised constructions of the environment. Yet, the book fundamentally contributes to a theory of entanglement. While the fouling suggested by the Èfik term kòmó raises a range of problematics associated with contamination, the methodological analytic of ‘entanglement’ in this book concerns itself with problems of cultural modernity, the temporality of history, the materiality of designed and fabricated things and slippages at the quantum – or, perhaps, supernatural – level: problems that the author applies to understand a global South in its multiple complexities of language, spirituality, time, space and materiality. For Godlewski, the global South, the meta-site that he claims for his emplaced scholarship, offers (as Ananya Roy arguedFootnote ¹) a home for complexity of theory rather than simply the complexity of further empirical variation. It is this global South for which the spatial paradigms of Old Calabar – ‘compound’, ‘masquerade’, ‘offshore’, ‘enclave’ and ‘zone’, which organise the chapters of this book – hold greater meaning and stage new interpretive understandings.

Organised chronologically from the early modern period to the contemporary moment, and based on close archival study, in-situ ethnographic research and rhetorical analysis of sources, the chapters debate received discourses and lay out new historical narratives to richly reconstruct Èfik worlds and environmental pasts. Laid out chronologically, each chapter examines a spatial paradigm in relation to sources for understanding it, thinking through varied strands of historiography and regimes of historicity to propel the constructed environments of the Bight of Biafra well beyond the framework of a case study (truly the barest description of this book's offering). Chapter 1, on the compound, turns to the sixteenth century to problematise the history and the heritage of a structure that is archive of both social autonomy and contact with foreigners, as well as symbol of Nigerian cultural tradition and national identity. Chapter 2, focusing on the period from 1729 to 1805, uses the concept of the masquerade to image spatial performativity and secrecy, acting as the backdrop to the burgeoning slave trade and as an infrastructure that lingered well beyond it. Chapter 3 connects the hinterland with offshore spaces, beginning in 1805 with the palm oil trade and the plantations that accompanied it, as this new economy supplanted the dominance of trafficking in enslaved people; in this chapter, European architecture begins to appear in the region. Its presence is cemented in chapter 4, in the enclaves of missionaries and imperial rulers whose presence dominated the landscape and diminished the town of Calabar itself, from 1846 until the war from 1967 to 1970, which was also based on the construction of an enclave, as Godlewski argues: that of Biafra, carved out of Nigerian national territory. Chapter 5, on zones, looks beyond neoliberal free trade zones to their effects on inhabitation, analysing the autonomy of gated residential zones and the many amenities they support (from restaurants to banks to churches to brothels to resorts), and coming back full circle to the compound as spatial paradigm. It is in an array of spatial entanglements – and the entanglements of historicity and historiography that enable us to understand them – that Godlewski proffers the greatest creativity. Through ekphrasis of the landscapes of the Bight of Biafra, he asks us to transcend fixities of space and identity, inhabit entanglements and think differently.