Racialized geographies of home: Property, unhoming and other possible futures

Abstract

This article interrogates the racial logics of home and homemaking. It opens up the conceptual terrain of home to property – a technology of racial dispossession and handmaid of racial capitalism. I reconceptualize home as dominion and as belonging. Unhoming names the synergies between these modalities that authorizes the unmaking of racialized subjects’ homes. I argue unhoming is a structural feature of racial capitalism and position resistance to unhoming as homemaking that might rescript propertied landscapes. Repositioning home as practised in propertied landscapes centres homemaking’s life-giving and death-dealing contradictions and excavates the work home does for – and (might do) to disrupt – liberal property regimes.

Unearthing Traces

“…These alternatives provide immediate answers to the dominant historical discourses. 16 -In parallel, the archival turn occurred, describing the move from archives-as-sources to archives-assubjects of history. 17 This means that archives (and particularly imperial archives) are no longer a place to store what can be said about the past, but are instead an infrastructure and series of practices analyzed as producers of knowledge and then of power.…”

“…15 In the words of the South African human rights activist and spokesperson for the partnering community that commissioned us in 2014 on the planning and construction of a bridge, Nonhle Mbuthuma: "We need to change the way things are put in our minds." 16 Designing and building: 'Social Architecture' (how something begins? )…”

“…The statement, presumably agonized over and rewritten many times, accepts as "given" the "historical and moral responsibility" and testifies to its intent to "ask Namibia and the descendants of the victims for forgiveness." 16 Historical violence may have been shared, but not the present. It appears that a separation from Germany and direct descendants of the victims had to be maintained; over the many years of negotiations After a lynching happens just below their new home, by extremists in a night of rioting, two friends go and sleep at their sister's house…”

“…The so-called Maker ZAC is symptomatic of neoliberal urban policies: cities compete by promoting a milieu suitable for the "creative class" and investments. 16 Within the ZAC scheme, the neoliberal temporality completes the colonial continuum in disregarding and erasing the traces of colonized populations. Finally, what legal-architectural means might exist for the grands ensembles to leave the colonial and neoliberal continuums and support households in taking root and transmitting traces?…”

Actually existing racial capitalism: Financialisation and bordering in UK housing associations

“…Focussing on property, which Bonds (2019) describes as a ‘race‐making institution’, and housing (Manning, 2021) adds further nuance and detail. The variously life‐giving and death‐dealing consequences homing/unhoming makes housing the ‘handmaiden’ of racial capitalism (Nethercote, 2022; see also Elliot‐Cooper et al., 2020a; Rivera et al., 2022), reinforced by the underexplored role of race in housing's centrality to financialised forms of accumulation (Fields & Raymond, 2021). Important research from the USA has examined both home ownership (Markley et al., 2020; Taylor, 2019) and the PRS (Akers & Seymour, 2018; Crowell, 2022) as sites of racial capitalism, emphasising how racialised minorities' exclusion from , and adverse incorporation into , property markets (re)produces spatially‐specific discrimination (Dymski, 2009; Wyly et al., 2012), creating ‘black towns in white spaces’ (Purifoy & Seamster, 2021).…”