Shaheen Alikhan

Waterfronts Of The Slave Trade: Littoral Landscapes Of The Long Eighteenth Century

This dissertation focuses upon the waterfronts connected through the notorious “triangle” of the transatlantic African slave trade. My research on select port cities and coastal areas integral to this trade is designed to assess the impact said trade had on the shaping of these liminal spaces. Waterfronts have been largely overlooked, though they were essential to the economies of four continents, the largest forced migration in human history, and the basis for much of our inland landscape. These landscapes also represented places in which enslaved and legally free African and African-Americans took opportunities to learn, communicate, earn wages, and build relationships outside of the parameters European and European-American society created and attempted to enforce. The alteration of the actual waterfront and the buildings used to facilitate the trade are still written into the land- and water-scape. This work looks at the extant landscape and argues that these waterfronts’ relevant functions were inextricably linked to their respective topographies. This work relies on a typological framework which can be categorized into two basic types: found and engineered. By situating these sites within their typologies, unique only in their respective scope and the availability of resources, I aim to underscore how vast and pervasive the network of empire was, resulting in a surprising architectural homogeneity which superceded established cultural and geographic architectural norms.

Shaheen is completing her second year within the interdisciplinary Constructed Environment PhD program at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, and also remains within the Department of Architectural History. She is part of a research team creating an interactive exhibit on the contact- and early colonial-era New Orleans area (Layered Memories project), is a contributing author to an edited volume on the architecture of the greater Caribbean, is a contributing author and co-editor of Conversations in the American Landscape, and has her first book, incorporating her Masters thesis research, under review. She has contributed for five years to the digital documentation of sites of enslavement and memorialization in and around the central Virginia area. Outside of her academic pursuits, Shaheen is an avid gardener, and registered and licensed with the Wildlife Center of Virginia.