Monrovia Modern

"Urban modernity was always about inhabiting the interstices concretized by the tensions between political imaginations and built forms. Monrovia is replete with forms that impose or elude, often arbitrarily without narrative. Danny Hoffman engages lives that treat the city’s ruining and remaking of modernity as bookends for an incessant hesitation, perhaps inability, to commit to invented futures of any stripe. In this hesitation there can only be a politics of lives enduring inexplicable, fragile yet stalwart orders persisting beyond their material ruin." - AbdouMaliq Simone, author of For the City Yet to Come: Changing African Life in Four Cities

“In this adventurous and provocative book, Danny Hoffman sets out on new theoretical and methodological paths to capture ‘urbanity’ within the modernist ruins of postwar Monrovia. Stepping away from the lenses of poverty, corruption, and infrastructural decay through which the African city is so often viewed, Hoffman takes Monrovia’s inhabitants’ lives seriously on their own terms and in light of the impossible possibilities imposed upon them by the liberating dreams of modernist architecture.” - Filip de Boeck, author of Kinshasa: Tales of the Invisible City

“Monrovia Modern is a beautiful and perceptive book. It will appeal to both architecture and anthropology scholars concerned with ruins, violence, material culture, photography and West African politics.” - Pauline Destree, Allegra Lab

"As a crucial intervention to visual ethnography, Hoffman’s work also reminds us that Africans are media consumers as well. . . . They are astute participants in the production and circulation of images of African violence. Through his commitment to photo writing as both theory and method, Hoffman tells us that photography is both a constitutive element of modern architecture as well as the character of African modernity." - Zachary Mondesire, African Studies Quarterly

"A beautiful book that weaves together urban theory, architectural comprehension, photographic excellence, and rich anthropological immersion in the lives of Monrovians. . . . Few books are as ambitious or as creative as this one. . . . Monrovia Modern will likely inspire scholars looking to combine photography, architectural design and critical social theory." - Jeffrey W. Paller, Journal of Modern African Studies

"Brave venture of a book.  . . . A pioneering work in the way it combines different methods, media, and disciplines. . . . Hoffman’s newest is a beautiful work that one truly enjoys reading." - Ilmari Käihkö, Anthropos

"Danny Hoffman provides us with new empirical insights on West Africa, and a fascinating and original way of thinking the city that can inspire future scholarship." - Maarten Bedert, African Studies Review

"Hoffman’s great contribution in this book is to point us toward the central importance of the built environment in preparing the scene for creating politics in the second and third decades after war’s end." - Mike McGovern, Journal of African History

"Hoffman’s book encourages fruitful thought about the politics of architecture and urban dwelling. . . This volume is rewarding reading." - Anne S. Lewinson, International Journal of African Historical Studies

“Monrovia Modern is a testament to the complexities of the relationships humans hold with their creations and offers a rare perspective on those connections after the destruction of war has altered their form and functionality.... The book will be of interest to Africanists of all disciplines, but especially urban anthropologists, geographers, and students of architecture.” - Barbara Hoffman, Africa Today