Abstract

A master performance of expert mimicry, specious heritage, and genius forg- eries, the Legislative Building is difficult to place comfortably within architec- tural history’s dominant narratives. Presented to the world as a monument both to and built by an exemplary postcolonial nation, a close reading reveals a history of the racial state that reaches well beyond its own imagined limits by describing the very means through which nations were conceived and unequally integrated into a liberal international order. The construction and exhibition of the native body, by native bodies, was at the center of a multiculturalist imagi- nation on which the success of liberal internationalism hinged.