Enlightenment and mission in early nineteenth century South Africa

In the early 19th century the London Missionary Society’s activities in South Africa were the subject of great scandal and a source of disrepute. The behaviour and attitudes of the first wave of LMS missionaries had challenged, and caused outrage, to both the political and moral norms of the colony. The radical attitudes and unconventional private lives of many of the early missionaries had also clearly shocked the Directors in Europe. In these controversies, and in the manner that the Society dealt with them, there can be read a contestation about not only the character, but also the purpose of mission activity. Was the Missionary task to work for political stability, to spread European values and help prepare a compliant and educated workforce? Or was it to save ‘lost souls’ and turn people away from idolatry and sin? Or, again, was it to fight for the oppressed, to liberate slaves and oppose tyranny? These debates were framed in complex and contradictory ways by a larger discussion that was informed by the new ideas and agendas that had emerged in the 18th century, commonly referred to as ‘The Enlightenment’. This paper traces the contours of an engagement between ‘Evangelical’ values and ‘Enlightenment’ principles through an exploration of the issues of the day such as: abolitionism, women’s rights, civilization and savagery. [From the Author]

The vague, the viral, the parasitic: Piranesi's metropolis

In mid-18th century Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings systematically document the old and new monuments, decrepit buildings and broken down infrastructures of a Rome that continues to inhabit and reinvent its past. His views of Rome offer a devastating account of the blurring of distinctions and articulations that time, use and neglect have imposed on the old differentiations of the urban and the rural, the public and the private, the monumental and the domestic in the 18th century city. Rome becomes for Piranesi the laboratory for a questioning of architecture that places his work well beyond the debate on style and on the origin that dominated the architectural discourse of his time. This paper suggests that Piranesi’s images anticipate the dispersion and sprawl of the city of today, in which the ‘vague’, the ‘viral’ and the ‘parasitic’ become modes of inhabitation and of transient negotiated definition. In the Antichità di Roma, ancient buildings are represented not only in their large scale and magnificence, but also in their decay and reversal to a state of naturalness. These works, together with the acute observations of the Vedute di Roma, provide the materials that are then dislocated, manipulated, cloned and endlessly mutated by Piranesi in the synthesis of the Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma, in which the historical city is almost entirely dissolved and replaced by an extraordinary congestion of fragments. When they are re-examined on the grounds of contemporary architectural and urban theory, the sites of Piranesi's views reveal anticipations of phenomena that affect the metropolis of today. Political, social and economic conditions have changed dramatically, but the questions asked of architecture in and by these sites challenge the definition of an architecture of style, forms and boundaries - in the 18th century as well as in the 21st -in favour of an architecture of change.