Temporal displacement: colonial architecture and its contestation

Abstract

Between 1950 and 1979 the Danish state worked to modernise Kalaallit Nunaat (a.k.a. Greenland) and concentrate the Indigenous Inuit population in a few select cities. Technologies of urban planning and development were merged with those of the colonial state. New forms of housing materialised whose qualities aligned with assimilation schemes, but were also resisted, their uses repurposed. These movements and counter-movements, I show, speak to how the built environment scripts time and temporality. Considering architecture as a ‘material politics of time’, I develop the concept of ‘temporal displacement’ in close conversation with the empirical material examined: archival materials and documents key to shaping and effectuating Danish-led policies, and documents that speak to Kalaallit’s contestation of the new types of housing being introduced. Three main aspects to temporal displacement are emphasised: (I) the eviction of the present to the past and the anachronism that follows from this; (II) biopolitical materialisations of the so-called ‘new order’; and (III) contestation by claiming contemporaneity for temporally evicted practices, activating that which hegemonic time renders as past as being in the present. The concept of ‘active past’ is suggested to capture how ideas of the past are activated in, unsettled, and renegotiated in the present.