Shiben Banerji is interested in the rhetorical and performative dimensions of architecture. His classroom teaching and historical scholarship are animated by three questions. First, how did architects in early modern Europe describe their interest in the nature of political oratory at the very moment that they began studying architectural forms that were not derived from Roman antiquity? Second, how did architects across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia mediate new conceptions of public association in the context of nineteenth-century colonialisms, and how did concomitant...
The forgotten history of the occult foundations of the early twentieth-century global city.
War, revolution, genocide, rebellion, slump. The economic and political turmoil of the early twentieth century seemed destined to rip asunder the ties that bound colonizers and the colonized to one another. The upheaval represented an opportunity, and not just to nationalists who imagined new homelands or to socialists who dreamed of international brotherhood. For modernists in the orbit of various occultisms, the crisis of empire also represented an opportunity to reveal...
The essays in this edited volume question, rather than presuppose, conceptions of democracy as representative and deliberative. In the Shadows of Democracy focuses on forms of rhetorical action that sustain normative claims about the virtues of democracy, including those advanced by rhetorical studies. The discipline of rhetoric emerges across the volume in two ways. First, as an entry into varieties of public discourse in which the public is not precisely the state. Second, as an object of critique. The result is a radical invitation to imagine how rhetorical critique might be used...
