Decolonizing Benjamin in the Tropics
The long history of Guayaquil's arcades
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 20153490 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Robert P Fenton (0000-0003-0378-7665, Department of Sociology and Anthropology George Mason University Fairfax Virginia USA, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 367-383 |
| Publication date | 2020-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0129-7619 • E-ISSN: 1467-9493 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/sjtg.12333 |
| OpenAlex | W3047131669 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 22 |
This essay interrogates the long historical development of Guayaquil's arcades, or soportales, by analysing their historical development and relation to global commerce through littoral Ecuador's experience of cacao capitalism (1700–1925). I do so by employing and referencing Walter Benjamin's now paradigmatic texts concerning commodity culture and modernity in Paris' arcades. My work critically and synthetically examines archival and historical sources that catalogue Guayaquil's urban and architectural development in that tropical city‐region. I explore how environmental factors, indigenous architectural techniques, globalizing commercial culture, cacao exports, and liberal ideologies form historical constellations expressing the multi‐layered influences contributing to the growth and modification of Guayaquil's arcades. This transnational history of the particular attempts to recast understandings of urban space, architecture, and the tropical as dynamic edges of capitalist cultural modernity. This essay both deepens and decolonizes Benjamin's work by analysing the importance of the ‘coloniality of power’ on the formation of Guayaquil's arcades and their afterlives as aura. Whereas the arcades of Benjamin's Paris presented him with the primary form of capitalism's cultural modernity, I argue that Guayaquil's soportales serve as constellations for reading an alternative (tropical) modernity predicated on plantation agriculture, Eurocentrism, and cultural hybridization as an expression of political economy
Aesthetics · Archaeology · Capitalism · Commodity · Epistemology · Eurocentrism · Ideology · Indigenous · Modernity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Urbanism · Anthropology · Architecture · History · Law · Philosophy · Urban Planning and Governance · Walter Benjamin Studies Compilation
Introduction
Tales of Two Cities
Rule by Aesthetics
Conclusion
Fragments of Modernity
Paris, Capital of Modernity
The Politics of Sentiment
The Colonies in Concrete
Power, Nature, and the City. The Conquest of Water and the Political Ecology of Urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador
The Modern World-System III
Imagen e idea de Guayaquil
Urbanisms, worlding practices and the theory of planning
Towards a new epistemology of the urban
Cosecheros-huerteros
A Commercial Traveller in South America
Guayaquil Through Independence
Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America
Guayaquil, ciudad de soportales
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,25 |
| Citation span | 2022 - 2022 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |