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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Prita Meier, "Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere" (Indiana UP, 2016)
Description: On the Swahili coast of East Africa, monumental stone houses, tombs, and mosques mark the border zone between the interior of the African continent and the Indian Ocean. In Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (Indiana University Press), Prita Meier explores this coastal environment and shows how an African mercantile society created a place of cosmopolitan longing.Meier understands architecture as more than a way to remake local space. Rather, the architecture of this liminal zone was an expression of the desire of coastal inhabitants to belong to places beyond their homeports. Here architecture embodies modern...