Modernism’s Magic Hat

With a flourish worthy of his subject, Ijlal Muzaffar expertly reveals the conjuring tricks by which the neocolonial project of “development” without redistribution or reparation was carried out across the Global South. Modernism’s Magic Hat shows how, serving the Bretton Woods institutions, architecture and urbanism helped decisively in shifting impossible burdens onto those from whom the most was stolen. Thus, the earnest provision of half-built houses becomes sweat-soaked risk management. Or, “tropical architecture’” as land reform reproduces colonialism’s indirect rule. Unsparingly dragging modernism’s dimly lit performances into the brilliant daylight, Muzaffar holds the whole show accountable not for its failures but for its success. ~Reinhold Martin, Columbia University, author of Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University

A searing account of the economic, epistemic, and aesthetic fictions of modern architecture that have been mobilized to mask colonialism's ravages on the one hand and postcolonial predicaments on the other. Modernism’s Magic Hat reckons with postwar institutions of development, including the UN, making this an important intervention in architectural history from the south. Across multiple locations in Africa and Asia, Muzaffar offers fugitive conceptual thinking on risk, debt, and planning in the very formations of modernism. ~Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Brown University, author of The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories