April 15, 2020: My partner Nick Stoutt, a Senior Associate at Safdie Architects, talks with me about my serpentine path to and through the PhD. Listen to the show here. We touch on topics important to working couples such as work-life balance and the supports systems that allow for career flexibility, and compare our professional paths. We also discuss how I chose my dissertation topic, tentatively titled, Building Négritude: the Construction of West African Modernity After Independence.
Dariel Cobb is a PhD candidate in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture division of the Department of Architecture at MIT. Her work examines modern art and architecture across the Black Atlantic, with a particular focus on plastic synthesis between art and architecture, the influence of Négritude on expressions of nationalism, and the entanglement of modern architecture and "tropicality" in the postcolony. Her dissertation explores post-colonial expressions of national identity in Francophone West Africa, and the discursive milieu which influenced creative exploration at mid-century, including the work of ethnographers, writers, and artists alongside architects. Dariel has written about Afrofuturism and the technological body in Africa; the climate discourse in modern architecture; juridical definitions of space; the relationship of nomadic peoples to built space, and the various ways “built” is defined. Her recent publications range from the work of Angolan photographer Kiluanji Kia Henda, to the design of urban Luanda, to the discipline of creative labor and the economics of architecture as work. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master of Architecture from Yale University.
Afrofuturist Touchstones
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Film, "Brother from Another Planet," 1984, dir. John Sayles
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Octavia E. Butler, sci-fi author, 1986; c. Patti Perret. I recommend the Xenogenesis series.
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| Samuel Delany, author; c. Patti Perret. I recommend his novel Dhalgren. |
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