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Postcolonial Studies and Memoirs of Travel, Diaspora, and Exile Doris Duke’s Shangri La and Architectures of Autobiography In 2003, ten years after Doris Duke’s death, portions of her Honolulu home, Shangri La, were opened for public touring. The product of a passion for Islamic art that Duke developed on her eight-month honeymoon when she visited the Taj Mahal, Shangri La houses the fifth-largest collection of Islamic art in the United States. Before taking a museum shuttle to this well-hidden, oceanfront home, visitors begin their tour at the Honolulu Academy of Art with a video. In Creating Shangri La, University of Hawai‘i professor of architecture Kazi Ashraf states, “I see the house as kind of an autobiography of Doris Duke. Some people write diaries. Doris Duke built” (Noey). Shangri La is an Orientalist fantasy as well as a kind of autobiography. Although much of Islamic art is religious, Duke was not Muslim. And yet Duke’s investments in Islamic art cannot be dismissed as superficial: her adult life was largely occupied by the study and acquisition of this art; she oversaw every detail of the construction of Shangri La, a lifelong undertaking . Her control over its design ranged from its architectural layout to the cleaning with cotton swabs of the entire grime-encrusted interior of an eighteenth-century Syrian room that she purchased through New York University. She put the objects to decidedly unconventional uses; for example, the dining room table is made from a bed, and Duke fashioned lamps by drilling holes through seventh-century vases. In the house’s central courtyard, she achieved her desired “magical Arabian Nights quality” by adhering strings of Christmas lights inside metal lamps so intricately carved that they appear to be made of lace. She arranged other pieces with equal disregard for tradition: mosaics are displayed like pictures in a Western art gallery, and none of her several mihrabs, or prayer altars used to orient Muslims in Saudi Arabia toward Mecca, face East. Moreover , although Duke archived every bill of sale, she did not consistently document the time periods or origins of her 3,600 (and counting) art pieces. She mixed and matched objects from different Islamic countries and time periods with one another and with contemporary Western-style chApter 3 78 chapter 3 furniture, including an enormous Baccharat chandelier originally made for the Islamic market. Duke’s Shangri La is a highly personal and, as its name suggests, in many ways a Western vision, one without counterpart in any Islamic country. A cultural hybrid, Shangri La not only combines East and West but also draws on its location in Hawai‘i. The incongruous location for Duke’s home and its major collection of Islamic art owes to Duke’s honeymoon travels coupled with her attraction to surfing culture. A serious athlete, Duke settled in Hawai‘i after visiting it as part of the same honeymoon that brought her before the Taj Mahal, and she consorted with worldclass Hawaiian surfers including the Kahanamoku brothers, who gave her the Hawaiian name Lahilahi. With state-of-the-art technology, Shangri La features screened interiorized spaces that are a hallmark of Islamic architecture that transform with the touch of a button into Hawaiian-style outdoor spaces that open Shangri La to dramatic views of the ocean, the lush tropical landscaping, and the cooling trade winds. The living room reflects this cultural mixing as well as Duke’s disregard for the spiritual meanings or histories of her art objects: what Duke called the house’s “focal point,” a mihrab made by a famous artisan in 1265 for an individual’s tomb (and a piece for which Duke outbid the Metropolitan Museum of Art) occupies most of the western wall. This mihrab is counterbalanced with a striking view of Diamond Head Crater, O‘ahu’s eastern landmark. Floors made of polished coral or volcanic rock indigenize the Islamic practice of fashioning art from locally available materials. Thus the home draws eclectically on both Islamic and Hawaiian orientations, materials, and cultural traditions, creating not only disjunctions but also crossings and connections among different parts of the world as Duke’s routes of travel, architectural assemblages, and art collecting also conjoin them. Financed by the Duke family fortune to which Doris Duke was sole heir, the house is the product of unimaginable wealth. Enormous mosaics and entire ceilings were commissioned from around the world and shipped in, and 150 workers were employed full-time for...

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