Leisure as a settler colonialist enterprise: Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, ‘Designing Terra Nullius: Mid-century Modernism and Settler-Colonial Leisure’, in Sibel Bozdoǧan, Panayiota Pyla, Petros Phokaides (eds), Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism, Routledge, 2022 | settler colonial studies blog

Leisure as a settler colonialist enterprise: Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió, ‘Designing Terra Nullius: Mid-century Modernism and Settler-Colonial Leisure’, in Sibel Bozdoǧan, Panayiota Pyla, Petros Phokaides (eds), Coastal Architectures and Politics of Tourism, Routledge, 2022

28Jun22

Abstract: This chapter considers the ways in which mid-century modernism configured Southern California’s leisurescape by implicitly articulating and reproducing terra nullius as a colonial mode of territorial management. The relation between the Reservation of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians and the modern development of Palm Springs, California is historicized in connection with the US’s legal-institutional colonial administration and corresponding disciplinary discourses of modern architecture. Rather than being a legal fiction or a past historical event, terra nullius is shown to be spatially produced through the architecturally mediated encounter of different settler-colonial legacies and capitalist modes of surplus extraction—a process that continues today. This architectural-territorial condition reduces Native sovereignty via two modes of biopolitical management: racialization and regionalization. Two projects in the Agua Caliente Reservation/City of Palm Springs—Lloyd Wright’s Oasis Hotel (1925) and William Cody’s Palm Springs Spa (1960)—show how architecture’s articulation of terra nullius since the 19th century conditioned this territory as a postwar leisurescape.

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