A Manifesto for a Post-Colonial Narrative Architecture

This is a manifesto for a post-colonial narrative architecture — a critical practice that dismantles the linear narratives of Western architectural history. The manifesto argues that architecture and its representations have historically been instrumentalised to consolidate power and abstract the violence of colonialism. This practice reframes the hyphen in ‘post-colonial’ not as a period after the colony, but as a mark of its persistent, mutating presence. The post-colonial operates in the tertiary space, rejecting colonial binaries to embrace the contradictory realities of a world where the plantation's logic has gone planetary. Post-colonial narrative architecture works through spiral time, not linear progress. It is opaque, refusing the colonial demand for transparency; lazy, sabotaging capitalist productivity; and loud, echoing the radical pedagogy of tobacco factory lectores. It is a form of ideological critique that treats colonial propaganda as a medium for subversive intentions, connecting the blueprint of the slave ship to the modern prison, and tracing the imperial boomerang from the colony back to the metropolis. This manifesto for a post-colonial narrative architecture calls for worldmaking against extinction, using fiction not as escape, but as a tool to bypass censorship and imagine liberation.