‘My Village’: organising the world and structuring the colonial architectural archive

Abstract

The problems of archives accumulated under colonialism are now well known. This paper uses aspects of the Percy Johnson-Marshall Collection at the University of Edinburgh to reflect on how to interpret the archive not only through what it records, or the relation between what survives and what does not, but in terms of alternative ways of understanding the archive’s conceptual structure. As an influential post-Second World War architect and planner, active in Britain and in international organisations, Percy Johnson-Marshall’s (1915–1993) attitudes towards the work of the welfare state were significantly formed by his colonial background and his reactions against that background. This article draws out the deeper meanings of his archive by deploying A. J. Greimas’ ‘semiotic square’, as interpreted by Fredric Jameson. Explaining it first via the legal thriller Dark Waters (2019), which has an archive as its narrative pivot, the semiotic square is then used to map the conceptual structure of the Johnson-Marshall Collection. Finally, the article focusses on ‘My Village’, a set of papers in the collection documenting a pedagogic project preparing Indian soldiers to reform their villages following wartime service. Here themes of organisation and disorganisation (good and bad villages) are specific articulations of the archive’s epistemology while the idea of collectivity is problematically related to them.