In-visible colonies: Modern architecture and its representation in colonial Eritrea, 1890--1941

This dissertation observes the interface of the colonial and the modern in architecture, space, and culture in Eritrea during the period of Italian colonization from 1890 until 1941. Presenting an interrelated set of questions that beckon from registers of absence in colonial Africa, the project asks how modern architecture functioned as a representational device in the establishment of an Italian colonial identity in Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. The "empty places" of the African continent imagined by the Italians presented an opportunity to imbue the landscape, the indigenous body, with the permissive gaze of the colonial mission so too did the first instances of a colonial city's construction. A dynamic matrix of conflicting ideological and aesthetic considerations established during the formation of colonial Asmara serves as the foundation for this dissertation.; While expanding vital historiographies of Italian colonialism and fascism, my dissertation illustrates how the elaboration of aesthetic codes in Asmara reinforced the creation of a modern empire. For the Italian colonies, these provisos overlap and diverge, providing a matrix of narratives that result in this project's new reading of the socio-political construction of space. Asmara embodies the twinned courses of modernity and memory, both of which frame heretofore unseen spaces in the colonial sphere. This project seeks to delineate those spaces marking the city's departure from the norms of Italian colonial engagement. Such narratives include, in the first chapter, early travelogues written by various authors in the colonies. In Chapter Two, I illustrate the evolution of public and private spaces in Asmara. Chapter Three, in turn, witnesses the modes by which the colonies were represented at colonial expositions in Italy. As a concluding chapter, I speculate on the notion of a colonial interieur as both a metaphor for colonialism and as a gendered site in the making of a colonial modernity. The project thus interrogates the interior of Asmara that is at once fascist and colonial and falls under the banner of a heterogeneous Italian modernism.