| dc.description.abstract | Zanzibar Pizza Hut: Stone Town’s Duckorated Sheds examines three cultural artifacts produced in Zanzibar’s Stone Town— Christ Church at the Old Slave Market, the kanga cloth, and the Zanzibar Pizza. These artifacts, which emerged in 1897, the early twentieth century, and the late 1980s, respectively, demonstrate a similar set of contradictions between what these objects’ suggested meaning is and what the conventions of naming imply, contradictions that produce what I’m calling Duckorated Sheds. Ultimately, the symbolic forms of these architectures have meanings that are obfuscated by the descriptions around them.
The shared salience of these cultural artifacts lies in the way they exist in and amplify multiple temporalities—knotting together the supposedly rupturing moments of the end of slavery, the inauguration of colonial power, and the late-millennium embrace of corporate multinational capitalism. The logics of Duckorated Sheds suggest less a rupturing event than a continuation of existing modes of thinking, being, and non-being—a continuation of slavery and of colonization in all its metastasized recapitulations. These objects ultimately lubricate the semiotic friction that occurs when a restructuring event alters the modes by which meaning is rendered. Zanzibar Pizza Hut takes these specific Duckorated Sheds and applies their logics to the design of a pavilion in Stone Town’s Forodhani Gardens, a colonial vestige that sits underutilized during the day but serves as the site for a food market in the evening, mainly geared towards tourists. Zanzibar Pizza Hut attempts to design for a variety of actors, all the while maintaining the awareness of the underlying continuities produced by the logic of the Duckorated Shed. | |
