Postcolonial Identity

Definition

Postcolonial identity, in the wiki's founding source, is the identity a formerly colonized territory constructs through its built environment — and the museum is its privileged workshop. Stokes-Rees, echoing Lawrence Vale, notes that in states liberated from colonial regimes, building design "has been used as 'an iconographical bridge between preferred epochs, joining the misty palisades of some golden age to the hazy shores of some future promise'"; "architecture in a postcolonial context can play an important role in the enforcing of political control, often under the guise of creating a 'national style.'" Whether a nation destroys the physical traces of colonialism or "build[s] upon the memories of that past through the reappropriation of colonial buildings," "the construction of new museums remains an important debate in many formerly colonized nations." The Museum of Macau is her case: "a systematic whole and key site for postcolonial nation building," a museum that "redefines old spaces as new, represents changing cultural practices, and creates new identities" — "a medium for the production of cultural identity, where 'the museum itself is on display.'"

The concept has identifiable spatial operations. Reappropriation: siting the national museum in the colonizer's fortress (the Monte Fortress, seat of Portuguese power) — "the juxtaposition of colonial history and postcolonial present – respect for colonial spaces adapted for museum use after independence – thus becomes instrumental in redefining the nation." Symmetry: East and West staged as "separate but equal" civilizations whose convergence is Macau ("the inexorable encounter between these two monolithic culminations of four thousand years of history"). Naturalization: a linear, progressive route through three floors that renders the relation of past to present "natural – a past in symbiotic relation to the present." Univocality: the Director's admission that the Project Team "didn't want to talk about different versions of this history or different opinions" — a harmony narrative ("blended and balanced to live in a peaceful way") built, literally, into the building.

The concept's diasporic register — identity constructed not by the state but by dispersed subjects — comes from Stuart Hall, carried into the wiki by Hadjiyanni's chapter: Hall's theoretical framework (on how cinema can position Black Caribbean identity) "can be employed to guide architectural and design responses to immigration and displacement," positioning interiors themselves as "a form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak." Where the museum constructs the nation's identity, the immigrant's interior constructs the diasporic subject's — Mexican "traditional patterns, colors, and motifs that adorn interior walls become an opportunity for dialogues around the process by which a color palette came to be associated with Mexicans – and the implications of that association." The same constructivist operation, scaled from the national to the domestic: see global-constructs, transbodied-space.

Key Thinkers

• Emily Stokes-Rees — the concept's wiki source: the Museum of Macau as key site of postcolonial nation building, its strategies (reappropriation, symmetry, naturalization, univocality) read from spatial design.
• Karen Burns — the postcolonial reading turned back on criticism itself: the Baker House commentaries as a site where "myths of unreadable Africa" organize architectural interpretation, and the warning that retrieving the colonial subject "as an exemplum of alterity is to keep pinning her back against the wall, to that place already assigned to her by criticism" — postcolonial criticism's own risk of "repeating colonialist operations" (editors' framing).
• (Discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log: Lawrence Vale, Architecture, Power and National Identity (1992), the "iconographical bridge" and "national style"; Cathryn Clayton, "Imagining Macau" (2001), local identities in transnational formation.)
• Stuart Hall — the diasporic identity theorist (via Hadjiyanni): "Cultural Identity and Diaspora" (1990) — the representation thesis positioning interiors as "a form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects"; not yet paged (see log).

Related Concepts

• Symbiotic Spaces — the frame the identity claim wears: mutual benefit of museum, nation, building, and narrative.
• Narrative Space — the medium: spatial configuration shaping knowledge and history into a national story.
• Exhibitionary Complex — the disciplinary apparatus through which the national narrative is internalized.
• Adaptive Reuse — reappropriation of colonial buildings as the concept's characteristic building practice — reuse "instrumental in redefining the nation."
• Aspirational Identity Artefact — the sibling identity-building figure: buildings commissioned to project a city's/nation's desired identity (Zamparini et al.), here in the postcolonial museum register.
• Interiors as Global Constructs — the concept's domestic-scale descendant: identity constructed through interiors rather than museums, for dispersed subjects rather than nations (Hall via Hadjiyanni).
• Iconic Architecture — symbolic weight: "high points are automatically places of iconicity"; museums as the building type of highest symbolic importance.
• Mutedness — the political cost of univocality: "different versions of this history" are excluded from the designed narrative.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Symbiotic spaces (Stokes-Rees 2018) — the source that founds the concept in the wiki: Vale's national style; the fortress reappropriation; the East/West symmetry and equal-civilizations display; the "natural" linear past; the exclusion of "different versions"; the museum as "product and producer" of identity.
• A House for Josephine Baker (Burns 1997/2006) — the concept's criticism-side register: postcolonial analysis applied not to a nation's built identity but to the interpretive apparatus that assigns colonial otherness. The Baker House's exterior read as "vaguely evocative of African architecture" (Tournikiotis, via Burns) shows the colonial referent operating in architectural criticism; Burns's double caution — that the readings "send the referent 'Africa' into a hazy and apparently unfocusable, imprecise reading (a smudge)" and that retrieving Baker as alterity's exemplum repeats the operation ("pinning her back against the wall") — defines the risk every postcolonial building-study (including the Macau harmony-narrative) runs: the colonial difference restaged as the analysis's own theme. See primitivism, epidermal-schema.
• Interiors as global constructs (Hadjiyanni 2018) — the concept's diasporic register: Hall's representation thesis transferred from cinema to interiors — "a form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover places from which to speak" (Hall 1990, p. 237); the immigrant interior as the diasporic counterpart to the national museum; designs "that allow room for questioning how a group is defined" as the constructivist method against static identity. See global-constructs, cultural-constructivism, transbodied-space.

Open Questions

• Can a museum housed in the colonizer's fortress narrate the colonial violence that built it — or does the "respect for colonial spaces" domesticate the story by design?
• The MoM's identity is blending (symmetry, shared cannonballs, three faiths); is postcolonial identity inherently a symbiosis-claim, or is the MoM's harmony narrative a Macanese special case masking a harder politics?
• How does the postcolonial museum's construction of identity relate to the iconic building's projection of city identity (aspirational-identity-artefact) — state pedagogy versus market branding, or two phases of one apparatus?
• What would a postcolonial narrative space look like that staged "different versions of this history" — multiplicity of routes, contested labels, unprivileging of readings — and is that compatible with the museum's "special social authority"?