Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination

Esra Akcan is a Professor in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. She completed her architecture degree at the Middle East Technical University in Turkey, and her Ph.D. and postdoctoral degrees at Columbia University in New York. Akcan received awards and fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University, Graham Foundation, Canadian Center for Architecture, American Academy in Berlin, UIC, Institute for Advanced Studies in Berlin, Clark Institute, Getty Research Institute, CAA, Mellon Foundation, DAAD and KRESS/ARIT. She is the author ofLandfill Istanbul (2004); Architecture in Translation: Germany, Turkey and the Modern House (2012); Turkey: Modern Architectures in History (with Sibel Bozdoğan) (2012);Open Architecture: Migration, Citizenship and the Urban Renewal of Berlin-Kreuzberg by IBA-1984/87 (2018); and Abolish Human Bans: Intertwined Histories of Architecture (2022).
Iftikhar Dadi is John H. Burris Professor in History of Art at Cornell University. He researches modern and contemporary art from a transnational perspective, with an emphasis on methodology and intellectual history. Another research interest examines the film, media, and popular cultures of South Asia. He has authored The Lahore Effect: Cinema Between Realism and Fable (2022), Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010) and edited The Lahore Biennale Reader (2022) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015). He has co-edited Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2012); Tarjama/Translation (2009); and Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001). As an artist he collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi. Their work investigates questions of memory and borders in contemporary globalization, and the productive capacities of urban informalities across the Global South.

Introduction: Migration and Discrimination Part 1: Two Partitions 1. Partitions and an Anti-Xenophobic Architectural Historiography 2. Living on Another Displacement’s Ruins: Adana’s Döşeme Neighborhood in Turkey 3. September 6–7, 1955–ongoing: Discrimination, Dispossession, and Practices of Memory and Survival 4. Homogenizing the Border: Kars after the Pogrom of 1955 5. 1960s Tax Law and Non-Muslim Exodus from Istanbul: Turkification of the City 6. Art and the 1947 Partition of South Asia 7. Partition Migration and Urbicide in Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man 8. "He never said that you leave for ever": South Asian Partition and Film Migration to Pakistan 9.The Perpetual Mohajirs: Leon Henrard’s Report on Pakistan’s Future 10. Partition Thinking and the East African Gaze toward Pakistan Part 2: Two Diasporas 11. Kreuzberg and an Anti-Discriminatory Architectural Historiography 12. Exile, Postcards, and a Return to Cold War Berlin 13. Migrants and Muses: Güney Dal’s First Novel Attracts Little Attention When Published in German Translation 14. Berlin as an Urban Synecdoche for Immigration 15. Conceiving Solidarity Across Borders 16. Be/longing Berlin: Remembering Futures in Migration 17. Pakistani Diaspora Artists in the UK 18. Rasheed Araeen: An Aesthetics of Resistance 19. The Cinema of Hanif Kureshi: My Beautiful Laundrette (1985) 20. Fun^Da^Mental’s "Jihad Rap"