Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere

Writing a review entails taking a book apart, fragmenting it into a set of claims and concepts to be critiqued. In the case of Prita Meier's Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere, this is no easy task. Compact and complex, Meier's sensitively differentiated historical exploration of Swahili Coast material culture is a challenge to unpick. She does not present a simple argument, but an aggregate of fine-grained analyses of a diverse range of subjects and objects that contribute to producing the constructed environments of Lamu, Mombasa, and Zanzibar. By layering studies of porcelain plates imported from China, full-scale oil portraits of Sultan Barghash authored in Paris, mass-manufactured cast-iron verandas from Glasgow, and local coral-stone merchant houses, Meier collapses binaries such as local/global, high/low, or indigenous/foreign and challenges established analytical categories—for example, the nation state. In this innovative and carefully considered book, she persuasively argues that real and imagined...