Conclusion

In Chapter 2, I argued that the purity of the modern can be opened to form a new hybridity: White Skin, Black Mask. This hybrid formation provides a non-pejorative conception of the modern because it must be acknowledged that the modern is oĞen defined in static opposition to the premodern, to traditional or even notions of the uncivilised and the savage. A hybrid conception of the contemporary involves both an appropriation of the modern and a subversion of its exclusionary purity through the inclusion of formerly silenced narratives. If I have appeared to support the African side of the equation, then this was so, because there was never any doubt as to the thoroughly assertive position of the modern with respect to the case studies of this book. It will be remembered that in Chapter 1, Fanon’s diagnosis does not involve a clear-cut binary because the masks of identity that he uncovers, at times, retain the effects of reversal, where the undecided status of ‘authentic’ identity destabilised the stasis of the binary relation. The play of mask and skin is a ‘both-and’ and an ‘in-between’, not an ‘either-or’. In the architectural terms of post-apartheid public designs, we may state that achieving inclusivity has required themes of African material tectonics, climate, landscape, paĴerns of dwelling, long-surviving figures, types and symbols including imaginaries of the prehistoric and the precolonial, cultural metaphors and handcraĞ, both modern and traditional – elements and imaginations that have been layered onto the architectural object. The distinction of mask and skin – for instance, understood as architectural structure and surface treatment – was not intended as a closed binary, but rather as an interpretive device for studying the complex, hybrid relations that have occurred between distributions of formerly excluded elements.