Joseph Godlewski. <i>The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra: Spatial Entanglements</i> . Routledge, 2024. 312 pp. 92 b/w illustrations. $45.59. Paperback. ISBN: 9781032708232. $42.74.

In The Architecture of the Bight of Biafra Joseph Godlewski examines changes in the spatial organization and architecture of the Bight of Biafra region.Centering his analysis on the historic city of Old Calabar, Godlewski contends that the politics of the region alongside entanglements with global capitalism impacted patterns of urban transformations since the seventeenth century.He argues that a combination of the region's decentralized politics and global market pressures, from the Atlantic trade to the postindependence eras, intertwined "to produce patterns of urban enclavization" in Old Calabar (10).According to Godlewski, these shifts in Old Calabar are reflected in the built environment and spatial experience of the city and in this way, the author brings the built environment into conversation with historical transformations in the political economy of the city.Utilizing an impressive range of archival and visual sources, including European travel accounts, maps, missionary documents, oral sources, colonial records, and contemporary fieldwork, Godlewski conceptualizes the built environment of Old Calabar as sites of sociocultural, political, and economic entanglements.The author deploys the concept of "entanglement" to analyze the diverse and interconnected "relationships that constitute a space without presuming to study them in isolation or reverting to oversimplified narratives about cultural and technological progress" (15).Within this framework, the Efik traders of Old Calabar, alongside their partners in the interiors, built disparate domestic and offshore spaces that were integrated into the infrastructure of trade and relationships with European missionaries and colonial administrators.Divided into an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, the book traces the evolution of five paradigmatic spaces: the walled "compound," the "masquerade," the "offshore," the "enclave," and the "zone."Through these spaces, Godlewski shows how the built environment of Old Calabar is intricately linked to the emergence of a Black Atlantic modernity starting from the seventeenth century to contemporary times.The first chapter foregrounds the traditional walled compound of Efik communities, which the author argues were not only domestic spaces but centers of daily life, trade, and worship.Chapter Two introduces the "masquerade," a concept deployed to analyze the activities of the Ekpe secret society.Godlewski shows how Ekpe regulation of the Atlantic trade, alongside its local judicial functions and religious roles, created "a charged space