Shiben Banerji tracks the figure of the migrant in the American architect Marion Mahony’s unpublished memoir, The Magic of America. Mahony composed the text between 1938 and 1949, in the twilight of her five-decade-long career across the United States, Australia, and India. The migrant appears in Mahony’s text as a figure of responsibility—one who prizes accounting for their actions to another. The obligation to hold oneself accountable to others, including other species, had emerged as a theme at the dawn of the twentieth century amid a contentious transnational exchange on the urban environments that could foster a global subjectivity. Interventions in this debate, which drew in the period’s most renowned modernists, took the form of a succession of plans for cities, suburbs, and communes, as well as experiments in building, drawing, printmaking, filmmaking, and writing. In the wake of Hiroshima, the formation of a subject whose choices and actions exemplified the unity and common fate of the human race gained new salience. At the very moment when responsibility ceased to be meaningful as a political category, Mahony insisted on its enduring value as an ethical category.
Shiben Banerji is an associate professor in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Shiben earned a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture, as well as a Master in City Planning, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a BA from Columbia University. His research practice, historical scholarship, and classroom teaching focus on the work of art and design in cultivating habits of democratic judgment. Shiben is the author of Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press, 2025) and the coeditor of In the Shadows of Democracy: Possibilities for Rhetoric beyond Rhetorical Studies (Intermezzo, 2025).
Organised by Professor Robin Schuldenfrei, Tangen Professor in 20th Century Modernism at The Courtauld, as part of the research cluster Migrations: People, Politics, Objects.
