Description
This paper contributes to critical alternatives in world politics by advancing a relational and decolonial approach that, through discourse and visual analysis, and archival methods, reimagines how global relations are produced, lived, and theorized through postcolonial and material sites such as FESTAC Village. Built in the 1970s for the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC ’77), the estate emerged from collaborations between Nigerian authorities, Afro-diasporic activists, and Romanian socialist architects. Today, it stands as both a contested urban space and a living archive of decolonization within the Cold War context. The paper conceptualizes the estate as a vessel for conversation. The paper traces how identities, ideologies, and political practices continuously overlap and redefine one another within this physical space. Through this lens, FESTAC becomes a space where global and local forces co-create meaning, blurring the boundaries between structure and agency, design and inhabitation, ideology and everyday life. Methodologically, the paper bridges architecture, cultural history, and International Relations to demonstrate how built environments can ground new thinking in the discipline. FESTAC invites us to rethink world politics as an evolving canvas. By using a transnational lens grounded in the materiality of FESTAC Village, the paper argues that socialist architectural legacies persist through adaptation, resistance, and civic activism.
