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Michelle Apotsos Architecture, Islam, and Identity in West Africa: Lessons from Larabanga New York: Routledge, 2016. 216 pp.; 61 b/w ills. Hardcover $144.00 (9781138192454)
A book-length scholarly work on architecture on the African continent is so rare that a new publication is cause for celebration in the small community of scholars who study this topic. Michelle Apotsos’s in-depth, diachronic study of architecture in the Islamic community of Larabanga in northern Ghana fits the bill. The book accomplishes multiple tasks. It reconstructs the history of Larabanga as a seat of Islam in the West African savanna-including the history of its dominant ethnic group, the Kamara-and traces the simultaneous emergence of an architectural idiom that embodied the town’s unique identity. In the process, Apotsos also writes a concise and synthetic summary of Islamic architecture that overcomes the conventional dichotomy between Islam in North Africa, southern Europe, and the Arabian Peninsula and Islam below the Sahara. The book is the most recent monograph written in the anthropologically inspired tradition established in some of the first postindependence histories of African architecture by Western scholars including Labelle Prussin and Suzanne Preston Blier.
After a brief introduction, in which she takes readers on a visit to the mosque in contemporary Larabanga as though they were part of the stream of foreign tourists who have recently descended on the town, Apotsos frames her book as a challenge to conventional understandings of architecture as a material expression of permanence and presence. She suggests that “Afro-Islamic” architecture in particular poses an alternative because it emphasizes process instead of product and models modes of presence that are not normatively permanent. Accordingly, the scholarship on African architecture-most of which has been produced by Western interlocutors-has taken the problem of articulating difference in a nonessential manner as its raison d’être. It has, somewhat unsuccessfully, used concepts such as “postcolonialism,” “world architecture,” the “vernacular,” and “regionalism” to try to come to terms with this issue. After her synopsis of major questions in Africanist architectural history, Apotsos completes one of the most successful chapters of her...