Today, most colonial-era modernist mass housing is seen as fundamentally broken: crumbling concrete spaces of social alienation and containment that fractured societies both then and now. In Poetics of Repair, Katarzyna Pieprzak examines how contemporary visual, literary, and performance art of the Maghreb has the potential to change the terms, histories, and imagined futures of mass housing in North Africa and France. Pieprzak dives deeply into contemporary art engagements with three mass housing sites that epitomize the French colonial geography of modernist architecture in the Maghreb. She identifies in this art what she names a transformative "poetics of repair": a practice that conjoins, puts in relation, or simply brings closer together broken materials, separated people, and severed timelines. Reading art and its engagements with mass housing, Pieprzak argues, has the potential to unmoor established knowledge and rehearse the tensions and productive ambiguities inherent to practices of constitution and revision. She demonstrates that such a reading practice is a step toward a reparative epistemology for mass housing that turns sites of wreckage and alienation into sites of possible solidarities and new formulations of history and experience.
Katarzyna Pieprzak is Massachusetts Professor of Francophone Literature, French Language, and Comparative Literature at Williams College. She is the author of Imagined Museums: Art and Modernity in Postcolonial Morocco.
Note on Translations and Transliterations ix Preface. Unexpected Paths to Mass Housing xi Introduction. Mass Housing, Maghrebi Art, and the Poetics of Repair 1 1. Sonic Repairs to the Grid: Art Engages the Epistemology of Hay Mohammadi, Casablanca 27 2. Affecting Relation in Climat de France, Algiers: Decolonial Poetics and Embodied Ethics of Recognition 69 3. Remembering and Repairing Women's Homes: Nanterre, Bidonville de la Folie 115 Conclusion. Touching Feed and Moving Hands: Art's Repair from Affective Gesture to Capacious Home 165 Acknowledgments 173 Notes 175 Bibliography 195 Index 205
"Poetics of Repair is a meticulously written, carefully nuanced analysis of the afterlives of colonialism as manifest in mass housing projects across an expanded Maghrebi context that includes urban space on both sides of the Mediterranean. Katarzyna Pieprzak reads artworks in a staggering array of media to give us a beautiful image of the ways in which art names and performs reparations that allow us to reimagine spaces otherwise all too often considered lost to squalor and despair." - Hannah Feldman, Keith L. and Katherine Sachs Associate Professor of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania "Poetics of Repair is an amazing, entirely original work of bricolage (in the most laudatory sense) in which Katarzyna Pieprzak combines museology, art history, ethnography, literary criticism, and poetry. She teaches us to critically analyze the culture, typologies, and trans-Mediterranean genealogies of mass housing through the many interventions of contemporary artists. I can't think of another book like it." - Susan Slyomovics, author of (Monuments Decolonized: Algeria's French Colonial Heritage)
