The latest book indexed by Southwest Humanities to be published is Diana Jean S. Martinez’s Concrete Colonialism: Architecture, Urbanism, and the US Imperial Project in the Philippines (Duke University Press, 2025). This important and in-depth study (which was published on September 30, 2025) examines the central role that reinforced concrete played in U.S. colonial rule in the Philippines. Martinez shows that concrete was not just a building material, but a tool of imperial ambition. By promoting reinforced concrete nearly everywhere—almost to the exclusion of other materials—the colonial regime reworked environments, public health, racial biologies, and even urban form. Martinez traces how concrete’s properties (durability, plasticity, strength) served colonial aims: controlling diseases, symbolizing power, constructing monuments, shaping everyday colonial life, and making the built environment itself an instrument of governance. She also demonstrates connections back to the U.S. (especially Chicago), where innovations in concrete were driven by particular urban and geological challenges—and then exported or adapted to colonial settings to remake landscape after landscape. Concrete Colonialism is a powerful intervention that reminds us that colonialism is not only about political domination or symbolic domination—it is also concretely built. For scholars of architecture, colonial history, urban studies, and material culture, this book opens up new lines of inquiry into how built form is both a medium and an outcome of imperial power. For more information, please see the publisher’s website here.
SOUTHWEST HUMANITIES 