Roy 2017 Disposessive Collectiveism

Geoforum xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum
Dis/possessive collectivism: Property and personhood at city’s end

Ananya Roy
University of California, Los Angeles, United States
a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t
Article history: This article uses the case of anti-eviction politics to examine the urban land question. Following the ideas
Received 13 August 2016 and practices of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and its global interconnections, it traces the poten-
Received in revised form 4 December 2016 tialities and limits of poor people’s movements as they battle displacement and enact a politics of
Accepted 22 December 2016
emplacement. In doing so, it seeks to expand existing understandings of dispossession. Drawing on crit-
Available online xxxx
ical race studies and postcolonial theory, the article pays attention to the relationship between property
and personhood in the context of long histories of racial exclusion and colonial domination. It asks: what
Keywords:
politics of home and land is possible outside the grid of secure possession and sovereign self? The work of
Evictions
Gentrification
the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign points to how various modes of collectivism can be asserted through
Race practices of occupation as well as through global frameworks of human rights. Challenging the secure
Dispossession categories of property and personhood through which liberalism is constituted, such politics is attuned
Liberalism to the present history of racial banishment but is also subject to aspirations of resolution and possession.
Property Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Home and land

‘‘Riding down the street, we stop at the preacher’s and seat our-
On the day that I was to spend with JR in Chicago in April 2015,
selves before the door. It was one of those scenes one cannot soon
he asked that we first meet at the Richard J. Daley Center and its
forget:––a wide, low, little house, whose motherly roof reached
courtrooms. There were various court hearings underway for fore-
over and sheltered a snug little porch. There we sat, after the long
closed properties in Cook County. Willie Fleming who goes by JR, or
hot drive, drinking cool water,––the talkative little storekeeper
Just Righteousness, walked from courtroom to courtroom to see if
who is my daily companion; the silent old black woman patching
any of the cases involved Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae loans. The
pantaloons and saying never a word; the ragged picture of helpless
Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, of which he is a co-founder, had
misfortune who called in just to see the preacher; and finally the
recently negotiated a mortgage loan modification program for
neat matronly preacher’s wife, plump, yellow, and intelligent.
Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae borrowers but he was worried that
‘‘Own land?” said the wife; ‘‘well, only this house.” Then she added
judges were not aware of the program or simply not abiding by
quietly, ‘‘We did buy seven hundred acres up yonder, and paid for
it. As I kept up with his busy stride, watching him greet various
it; but they cheated us out of it. Sells was the owner.” ‘‘Sells!”
court clerks and police officers, I realized that he was a familiar
echoed the ragged misfortune, who was leaning against the balus-
and frequent presence in these corridors. The courtroom was the
trade and listening, ‘‘he’s a regular cheat. I worked for him thirty-
first stop in an itinerary, one that was meant to reveal and connect
seven days this spring, and he paid me in cardboard checks which
various locations of struggle in the city. Our next stop was the Cab-
were to be cashed at the end of the month. But he never cashed
rini Green public housing project, or rather what still exists of it. JR
them,––kept putting me off. Then the sheriff came and took my
had spent some of his childhood years there, as well as in the
mule and corn and furniture––” ‘‘Furniture?” I asked; ‘‘but furni-
Robert Taylor homes, and it was where he first became involved
ture is exempt from seizure by law.” ‘‘Well, he took it just the
in activism, organising residents facing eviction. Driving past the
same,” said the hard-faced man.”
remains of Cabrini Green, the abandoned rowhomes and ‘‘blank
[W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903: 92]
slate” open space, he noted that Cabrini Green represented the
absurd brutalities of urban transformation: ‘‘We were evicted so
that the city could have all of this empty land.” This specific history
is an important part of JR’s activism. Indeed, in various portals of
communication he goes by the name ‘‘iamcabrinigreen.”
E-mail address: ananya@luskin.ucla.edu
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2016.12.012
0016-7185/Ó 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Please cite this article in press as: Roy, A. Dis/possessive collectivism: Property and personhood at city’s end. Geoforum (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.
geoforum.2016.12.012
2 A. Roy / Geoforum xxx (2017) xxx–xxx
Our discussions at Cabrini Green were abruptly interrupted by posters. As the skies darkened, homeowners and tenants facing
an urgent text message to JR’s phone: a family was being evicted eviction and foreclosure also arrived at the meeting. The Trice fam-
in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood of South Side Chicago. They ily, for example, were tenants in a foreclosed building that had
had contacted the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and he was been sold to a new owner who persistently threatened them with
urged to hurry to the home. We pulled up at the Lee home a few eviction. Case law was researched, stories and photographs were
minutes after the sheriff deputies had departed. Nestled among posted on the website, press releases were drafted, strategy was
neatly trimmed hedges on a quiet residential street, the house forged. ‘‘We will fight with you,” the group chanted in response
showed few signs – except for a green eviction sticker and an to each case of hardship.
unhinged front door – of the violence that had unfolded just before In the months that followed, the Lees entered into new negoti-
our arrival. A distraught Mr. Lee invited us into the home, stum- ations with Charter One Bank, including a possible repurchase of
bling over his words as he explained to JR that he and his wife the home with a new mortgage of $55,000. I asked Toussaint
had been at the Richard J. Daley Center that morning contesting Losier, co-founder of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, what
a pending eviction by Charter One Bank. The circuit court judge the Lees thought of this offer. They have mixed feelings, he said.
had postponed the hearing but the Lees returned home to find On the one hand they did not want to be uprooted; on the other
their front door broken and sheriff deputies in their dining room hand they were repurchasing what they already rightfully owned.
ready to implement an eviction. Since the Lees were able to Indeed, the repurchase negotiations were part of a long effort on
demonstrate that the court case was ongoing, the eviction was the part of the Lees to hold on to the home, a process documented
called off and the deputies departed. But the moratorium was tem- by the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign as part of their mobiliza-
porary and it was that realization that hung over our presence in tion on behalf of the family:
the Lee home. In the midst of the negotiations with the sheriff
Since 2013, Timothy Lee and his family have been trying to
deputies, Mrs. Lee had contacted the Chicago Anti-Eviction Cam-
repurchase the home that his elderly mother lost to foreclosure
paign, having heard about the movement from a friend in the
by Charter One Bank. Unlike most home loan foreclosure cases
neighborhood. JR quickly determined that what the Lees had faced
in the Chicagoland region, Mr. Lee’s mother had owned her
was a ‘‘pre-emptive eviction,” noting that this was a new strategy
home ’free and clear’, except for a $3300 home improvement
being undertaken by banks seeking to foreclose on homes. As they
loan she owed when she passed in 2010. After dealing with sev-
talked, JR sitting on the couch, Timothy Lee pacing frantically,
eral attorneys that failed to take their case forward, the Lees had
Eugenia Lee trying to calm their dog who had been caged by the
attempted to negotiate with the bank themselves, only to find
sheriff deputies to be taken to an animal shelter, I could not find
their offers to hold onto their family home repeatedly dismissed
words to respond to the moment. This was home – a living room
by bank officials who purchased the property at auction in
filled with framed diplomas and family photographs, carefully
February 2013. Six months ago, the Lees were finally able to
placed crochet doilies, lovingly curated shelves heavy with curios,
arrange to have an appraiser from Charter One view the house,
cream colored lamp shades covered in plastic, a mantlepiece rich
but never received any responses from bank officials, except
with dolls and statues. But this domesticity was now tenuous,
notices from the bank’s lawyers that they were in the process
forty-five years of habitation on the brink of eviction.
of having them evicted (http://start2.occupyourhomes.org/peti-
A week later I returned to the Lee home. The Chicago Anti-
tions/citizens-bank-don-t-take-the-lee-family-home).
Eviction Campaign had organized a rally to call attention to what
they insisted was unlawful eviction and to put pressure on Charter
One Bank to call off any subsequent evictions. Indeed, in Cook Timothy Lee’s own statement on the matter, also publicized by
County, the Sheriff’s office under Tom Dart had for a while refused the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign stated, ‘‘We are committed to
to enforce court-ordered evictions mainly because so many banks taking action to stay in our home, but would rather work out a res-
had filed inaccurate eviction orders (Hiller, 2013: p. 33). As Hiller olution with the bank.”
notes, the moratorium had strengthened the position of move-
ments such as the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign. That morning, 2. Poor people’s movements and the social category of property
in the crisp sunshine of a cold April day in Chicago, a small band of
human right defenders, as they called themselves, rolled out a ban- In his much celebrated book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the
ner and gave interviews to the lone television reporter and camera- American City, Matthew Desmond (2016) draws attention to the
man who were present for the press conference. Timothy Lee spoke persistent reality of evictions. No longer framed as the brutal but
eloquently about his hope that a solution could be found with the temporary crisis of the Great Recession, evictions are now being
bank so that he would not lose his family home. As the reporter interpreted as the institutionalization of housing insecurity. How-
asked details about the mortgage, a lilting voice interrupted the ever, following Rolnik, I view contemporary urban evictions as an
discussion of loans and lawyers, foreclosure and fraud. Martha integral part of the financialization of the housing sector, a world-
Biggs, perhaps the most famous protagonist of the Chicago Anti- wide process which she analyzes as a new frontier of capital accu-
Eviction Campaign, whose story anchored Gottesdeiner’s (2013) mulation, one that entails the ‘‘unlocking of land values” in cities
book, A Fight for a Place Called Home, prompted by JR, broke into (Rolnik, 2013: 1063). Evictions thus provide a window onto the
song. ‘‘This is the people’s territory,” she sang, her voice drowning urban land question, specifically who owns land and on what
out all other sounds on the street, ‘‘fight, fight, fight, for housing is terms, who profits from land and on what terms, and how the own-
a human right.” The camera pivoted towards her and for a moment ership, use, and financialization of land is governed and regulated
that stretch of sidewalk in Auburn Gresham became charged polit- by the state.
ical space. Of course, evictions are not the sole analytical site at which the
A few days before the rally and press conference, Timothy and urban land question can be investigated. For example, my recent
Eugenia Lee had attended, for the first time, the weekly meeting research studies a national program in India that sought to initiate
of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign. There, in a corner store- urban land reforms, legalizing informal habitation and creating pri-
front that had once been a coffee shop, the stalwarts of the move- vate property rights for slum-dwellers. Through genealogical anal-
ment gathered. Itself a site of foreclosure by Citibank, of eviction ysis and ethnographic exploration, I trace the difficult, and perhaps
threats, and ransackings by a property management company, impossible, task of converting a dizzying multiplicity of land
the office was a modest room with a few pieces of furniture and tenure, tenancy, and shelter claims into neat little parcels of cadas-
A. Roy / Geoforum xxx (2017) xxx–xxx 3
tral property that are legible to the apparatus of government and, practices, including those that articulate an ethics of human life
more audaciously, to global investors (Roy, 2014). In doing so, I in the face of social death. But the limits of emplacement and of
have become increasingly interested in how subordinated groups humanism are as instructive as their political potentialities.
stake claims to home and land, whether as beneficiaries of pro- Emplacement, for example, is fraught with postponement, a con-
grams of government (Roy, 2015) or as a part of the political reper- stant deferral of legal resolution which also marks the impossibil-
toire of poor people’s movements. ity of permanent and secure claims to home and land. If Berlant
In this essay, inspired by the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign (2005: 21, emphasis in the original) draws attention to ‘‘cruel opti-
and interconnected struggles, I focus on evictions as a point of mism” as ‘‘the condition of maintaining an attachment to a prob-
entry into an analytical engagement with the urban land question. lematic object in advance of its loss,” I am interested in the lived
But in particular, I seek to understand how such forms of contesta- process of loss, a loss that is ongoing rather than anticipated, or
tion work with, and rework, the social category of property. My experienced in the future.
intent is not only to contribute to the important and substantial Finally, I situate such processes in what I term city’s end. Draw-
debates about property but also to expand them by underscoring ing on the important book, Land’s End: Capitalist Relations on an
the relationship between property and personhood. My effort is Indigenous Frontier, by Tania Murray Li (2014), I conceptualize
informed by, and seeks to contribute to, various lines of inquiry, city’s end as a zone constituted through mundane and individual-
notably the following four. ized practices of property transactions and negotiations rather
First, following Blomley (2004: xvi), I pay attention to different than spectacular processes of primitive accumulation. I also mean
‘‘enactments of property.” Blomley (2004: 15) notes that ‘‘the city’s end in a second sense: that the struggles against evictions
question is not so much ‘‘what is property?” as ‘‘what is to count and foreclosures at such a location may very well seek ‘‘resolution,”
as property?”” I additionally ask: who can count as the subject for example the repurchase of property as in the case of the Lees.
who can claim home and land? Turning to debates in poststruc- City’s end is thus yet another analytical means for the complex task
turalist thought, I follow Butler and Athanasiou (2013) in their of rethinking dispossession, its ontologies and geographies.
efforts to rethink dispossession. While urban political economy Indeed, the effort to reframe possession and dispossession lie at
has focused on the dispossession of land, labor, and resources, the very heart of this essay. What, for example, becomes of the
Butler and Athanasiou (2013: 6) emphasize how ‘‘self-authoring logic of possession when dispossession is understood not simply
personhood” has been foreclosed for certain subjects. Thus, in as a process of capital accumulation but also that of racial banish-
addition to the questions, what counts as property, and who can ment? For while property may be owned through a subprime loan,
count as the subject who can claim home and land, their work through repurchase, and even through occupation of a foreclosed
leads to yet another question: ‘‘Who or what holds the place of home, what about the personhood that was once itself property?
the human?” (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 32). If certain subjects It is this foundational dispossession that suggests a consideration
are always necessarily dispossessed, or constituted as property of dis/possessive collectivism, a political potentiality that might
owned by others, how do they claim property? Do such claims also not be easily contained within liberalism’s compass of property
rework claims to personhood? and personhood, specifically possessive individualism. I thus inter-
Second, this expanded meaning of dispossession is especially pret such collectivism not as the antonym of individualism but
important for an expanded meaning of evictions. I rely on the sub- instead in McKittrick’s (2011: 948) sense of a ‘‘collective history
stantial body of work, notably that led by Elvin Wyly, Kathe New- of encounter,” what she describes as a ‘‘a difficult interrelated-
man, and others, to understand the present historical conjuncture ness—that promises an ethical analytics of race based not on suf-
of foreclosures and evictions as the conjoining of predatory finan- fering, but on human life.” This is the promise of poor people’s
cialization and racial capitalism. But I also follow the urging of movements that are fighting evictions in cities around the world.
urban social movements such as the Chicago Anti-Eviction Cam-
paign and LA Community Action Network to interpret evictions 3. The politics of emplacement
as part of broader processes of racial banishment. Such a frame-
work highlights the public means of evictions as well as forms of After we had spent time with the Lees at their home in Auburn
racialized violence, such as slavery, Jim Crow, incarceration, colo- Gresham on the day of the pre-emptive eviction, JR took me to see
nialism, and apartheid, that cannot be encapsulated within sani- some of the homes occupied by the movement. Organized around a
tized notions of gentrification and displacement. simple but elegant motto, ‘‘homeless people in peopleless homes,”
Third, if evictions are understood as an instantiation of racial the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign is often seen to be ‘‘a radical
banishment, then what is at stake is how the banished/dispos- urban homesteader movement” (Austen, 2013). Inhabited by
sessed subject enacts a politics of property and how such struggles members of the movement and restored through collective labor,
and claims inevitably entail a politics of personhood. For this, I turn these homes are now indistinguishable from those around them.
to a growing body of work on what Porter (2014: 3) calls ‘‘posses- No longer boarded up, they house multiple residents, nodes in a
sory politics,” how ‘‘struggles against dispossession too easily secret geography of activism and occupation.
become struggles for possession” often through the assertion of It is important to draw a distinction between these forms of
rights (emphasis in the original). Following Krippner (2015), I ask occupation and the vocabulary of occupation popularized by the
whether such politics can be read as an example of ‘‘possessive col- Occupy movement. Urban homesteading, as practiced by the Chi-
lectivism,” ‘‘the embedding of possessive claims typically associ- cago Anti-Eviction Campaign, requires a constellation of long-
ated with individual rights in what are in effect communal term strategies that enable shelter and inhabitation. In a 2012
relationships.” Or even bolder, can frameworks of racial banish- interview, JR thus drew a distinction between ‘‘occupying and
ment enable a decolonial and decommodified vision of land? My organizing,” noting that the work of the campaign has been to
ongoing engagement with the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, ‘‘show the occupiers [of the Occupy movement] how to organize”
partly ethnographic research, partly a relationship of collaboration (Salo, 2014). Aware of the illegality of such home occupations –
and solidarity, is an effort to understand and foreground such polit- the movement prefers to call them home liberations – they assert
ical potentialities. In this essay, I focus on one such political poten- moral cause in the face of persistent discrimination. Thus JR states:
tiality, which I term dis/possessive collectivism. While the obvious
manifestation of such collectivism is home occupations and related There have been way more people willing to risk going to jail,
practices of emplacement, I emphasize global imaginaries and ’cause what we do is illegal. And so we tend to frame it like this:
it was illegal for black folks and white folks to be in a room like home liberations, even when they take the exhausting spatio-
this back in the ’50s and ’60s, right? So we say it like this: dur- temporal form of musical chairs.
ing the civil rights, they did something ILLEGAL for something But postponement also marks the limits of the politics of
that was morally right. They did sit-ins, where in 2011 we’re emplacement. The poignant domesticity of liberated homes makes
doing something illegally that’s MORALLY RIGHT, you know evident what Berlant (2006: 35) calls the ‘‘impasse of living.” Fol-
what I’m saying, and we’re doing it in forms of livin’ in, on lowing Berlant (2005: 21), I interpret emplacement as a ‘‘cruel
live-ins. So we said during civil rights, sit-ins, to human rights optimism,” ‘‘a relation of attachment to compromised conditions
live-ins. That housing is a human right and we’re gonna enforce of possibility.” Particularly useful is Berlant’s emphasis on loss:
it ourselves. ‘‘Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment
[Salo, 2014: 222] to a problematic object in advance of its loss” (emphasis in the orig-
inal). Liberated homes are precisely such a problematic object. But
Berlant’s notion of loss also suggests a security of possession, an
I read these occupations – this strategic illegality – as a politics ontology of ownership. If we work with an expanded notion of dis-
of emplacement. In my visits to liberated homes on the South Side, possession, with attention to the subject who cannot thus claim
I was struck by the lived experience of domesticity: a meticulous possession, not even possession of personhood, then we have to
care, a display of sentiment, a curation of beautiful objects. I was rethink the idea of loss. Cruel optimism then is not attachment
reminded of the domesticity that had enveloped me during my in the advance of loss but rather attachment in the lived process
visit to the Lee home. In the liberated homes, I had expected to find of loss. The home – the American home – is a problematic object
the desperate bricolage of survival and the careless urgency of not because it will be lost in the future, through foreclosure or evic-
occupation. Instead I found a careful curation: patiently polished tion, and not because it cannot be legally claimed through
wood, a piece of quartz reclaimed for a kitchen counter, the favor- emplacement and occupation, but because it was always inse-
ite painting hung just right, mismatched chairs hugging a salvaged curely possessed by dispossessed subjects, those rendered outside
dining table, fireplaces that glowed with warmth while outside the the grid of white normativity. Bearing the promise of homeowner-
cold winds of April raged noisily. I use ‘‘emplacement” quite delib- ship, subprime lending only intensified this lived process of loss,
erately, drawing on at least two meanings associated the term: ‘‘replacing the old rigid justifications for exclusionary racism with
‘‘the process or state of setting something in place or being set in more flexible, entrepreneurial forms of inclusionary discrimination
place,” and ‘‘a platform or defended position where a gun is placed that promised opportunity and access to the wonders of the mar-
for firing.” Home liberations are the frontline of JR calls the ket” (Wyly et al., 2012: 572, emphasis in the original). Such cruel
enforcement and defense of human rights. It is also the intimate optimism is of course more than the wonders of the market; it is,
practice of constructing domesticity. Such domesticity is not nec- as Wyly et al. (2012: 586) argue, shaped by the ‘‘racial state,” nota-
essarily the aesthetics of possession. Porter thus notes that ‘‘the bly distinctive geographies of racialized risk and financial
specifically placed and relational nature of emplacement. . .has deregulation.
the potential to unsettle the dissociative nature of property” and
can be read as a ‘‘direct critique of the placelessness of property”
(personal communication). 4. Global genealogies
While the spatiality of emplacement is immediately evident, its
temporalities are perhaps less so. Yet, they are vitally important. In a poignant account of ‘‘gangland Chicago,” Ralph (2014: 170,
Relying on a vacant building ordinance (Section 13-12-25 of the 179) replaces the idea of the ‘‘isolated ghetto” with an analysis of
Municipal Code of Chicago), the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign ‘‘interconnections” and demonstrates how ‘‘inner-city injury” can
demonstrates that home occupiers are good citizens, improving be ‘‘experienced and reimagined as a means to overcome.” Ralph’s
and beautifying otherwise vacant and neglected property. But its framework is a vitally important way of thinking about the work of
claims to these improved properties are tenuous. There is no obvi- the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, especially its politics of
ous legal or political pathway to the formalization of these claims emplacement. But in this case the interconnections are strikingly
and as the movement leaders often note, most home liberators pre- global. The movement has its roots in imaginaries and practices
fer to stay under the radar than to be exposed to formal relations of of struggle in the global South. It also persistently engages with
documentation and ownership. Recognizing the fragility of these global institutions and discourses in order to transform injury into
claims and the exhausting effects of what the movement calls the ethics of human life. I seek to trace such global engagements
musical homes – where every one to two years, a family has to not to excavate an origins story but rather to consider the forms
occupy and renovate the next round of vacant homes – a new strat- of collectivism enabled by these interconnections and the mean-
egy has been to use property takeovers to pressure banks to donate ings of property and personhood, in other words, of dispossession,
property. The movement hopes to collect these donated properties that are thus entailed.
and create a community land trust. The Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign was catalyzed by the visit,
Such strategies raise the question of postponement. As I will in 2009, of Ashraf Cassiem to the United States. For a while, Cas-
demonstrate later in this essay, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction siem was a legend in Cape Town. A key figure in the Western Cape
Campaign on which the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign is mod- Anti-Eviction Campaign, he faced and fought police brutality in the
eled, relied on postponement as a way of slowing down the law, Cape Flats, resisting evictions, foreclosures, and service disconnec-
of clogging up the courts. Home liberations on the South Side of tions. Badly beaten by the police, most of his teeth knocked out,
Chicago seem to belong to the same repertoire of postponement: mauled by police dogs, Cassiem became the face of shackdweller
the deferral of eviction, the stalling of displacement. In this way, resistance to state violence and housing privatization. Well before
occupation – whether of the law, the courtroom, the foreclosed the American subprime crisis, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction
home – becomes a postponement of sorts, a rescheduling of debt Campaign came into political being by challenging foreclosures
and dispossession. As Hannah Appel notes, debt relations are also by banks in bond housing, state-developed bank-bonded houses,
always temporal relations, be it payment due dates or bond matu- as well as eviction orders issued by the city council for defaults
rity dates. But ‘‘while this extended temporality is designed to con- in council house rents or in service payments (Miraftab, 2006:
trol, it is also capacious ground for manipulation, deferral, and 197). Refusing representation by vanguardist NGOs, the campaign
disobedience” (personal communication). Such is the case with moved evictees back into their homes, blocked service disconnec-
tions, and made frequent appearances in courtrooms, not only When I met Ashraf Cassiem in Cape Town in June 2015, over tea
invoking the constitutional right to housing but also using the tac- and sandwiches at a quiet cafe in the Woodstock neighborhood,
tics of postponement, of ‘‘clogging up” the courts. Cassiem devel- the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign had dissipated. But Cas-
oped a reputation for being able to wear a suit and talk the law siem was still fighting foreclosures with a keen eye for the law and
as much as he did for a body broken by police beatings. And the a keen sense of the courtroom as a terrain of struggle. I had already
Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign developed a reputation for read the interview with him conducted by Oldfield and Stokke in
legal strategy. Mike Murphy, a lawyer who set up the Legal Coordi- which he had explained the importance of the courtroom thus:
nating Committee of the movement, explains the strategy thus:
In the court the magistrate asked: but who are you? They belit-
If you looked at the courts, like Goodwood or Kuils River, so tle you; make you feel like a nothing. I say: I am here to repre-
many people are being evicted everyday. It [the court] is being sent a poor family, to save these people from being evicted. . .
used as a debt collection system: just queues and queues of Just by standing, I am a spanner in the works. . .We’re not there
people and all that would happen is that, if they had a lawyer to win. We know we’ll lose (in most cases). So I laugh at the pro-
then they would negotiate their date to leave [the house]. More cess – I laugh at them, they don’t know how to deal with that. . .
often than not they never had a lawyer – or the lawyer would In the high court you’re not allowed to speak until you’re recog-
never arrive – and they [families] were being evicted hand over nised by the judge. To be recognised by the judge, to even be
fist. The very bulk of it gave me the idea for our sole aim to heard, you have to speak; you have to be rude and loud so they
delay and frustrate, to clog the courts up. . . So I tried to show know that you are there. One time the judge towered over me
them [LCC activists] how to delay and frustrate in ridiculous and shouted: Who are you? What are you doing here? I just
ways. talked until he stopped and saw that he must let me talk. So I
[Oldfield and Stokke, 2006: 152] talked really loud and really fast.
[Oldfield and Stokke, 2006: 152]
It is possible to read these evictions by private banks and local
governments in Cape Town, in neighborhoods such as Mitchells During our long and rambling conversation, unprompted, Cas-
Plain in the Cape Flats, which gained momentum in the late siem repeatedly returned to the tactics of presence and recognition
1990s, as a moment of brutal neoliberalization. And indeed it in relation to the state and its ‘‘papers.” ‘‘When we were dealing
was. But as the detailed accounts by Miraftab and Wills (2005) with evictions,” he argued, ‘‘we didn’t understand the papers. We
show, racialized histories are entangled with such forms of priva- struggled to understand it until we developed a legal strategy.
tization. Council houses, as they note, are ‘‘rental units built by We then understood that the law can be used by poor people for
the apartheid state during the 1950s through the 1970s to accom- poor people. And that strategy is postponement.” Indeed, he had
modate the population categorized as ‘‘colored” who were force- come to our meeting with a stack of legal papers – each a foreclo-
fully removed from their vibrant urban neighborhoods to sure case – and he took great pleasure in pointing out the minor
desolate, controlled areas” (Miraftab and Wills, 2005: 203). Many loopholes, the slips of legal language which might make possible
of the defaults on housing rents for which the urban poor, espe- a postponement, a delay, a deferral. This type of postponement
cially the elderly were being evicted in the late 1990s, were arrears has a resonance with the politics of emplacement and its fractured
‘‘accumulated during the apartheid-era rent boycotts” (Miraftab temporalities.
and Wills, 2005: 203). Similarly, bond housing emerged in the late But I was there to ask Cassiem a different set of questions. Intri-
apartheid era, ‘‘during a period in which the state and commercial gued by the relationship between the Chicago Anti-Eviction Cam-
banks together offered poor working-class black families a first- paign and the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, I wanted to
time opportunity to own affordable homes” (Miraftab and Wills, understand these global interconnections. Were these indeed the
2005: 203). The trajectory of bond housing departs from and yet horizontally networked relations of solidarity across poor people’s
bears striking resonance with subprime America. I quote at length movements celebrated by Appadurai (2002) as ‘‘deep democracy”?
from the vitally important history recovered by Miraftab and Wills In Chicago, JR had told me that it was activists from South Africa,
(see also Oldfield and Stokke, 2006) to make this point: notably Cassiem, who had taught them how to fight evictions
and foreclosures. ‘‘We were resisting displacement from Cabrini-
Shortly after the houses were delivered, many units’ walls and
Green but it’s our brothers from South Africa who told us what
foundations began to crumble and collapse. Because the banks
we should do next. Of course we cannot do it how they do it over
failed to respond to their complaints, some of the new home-
there. Imagine black people burning tires on the freeways of Chi-
owners conducted repairs at their own expense and boycotted
cago. That can’t happen. But they showed us the way.” In particu-
mortgage payments. Others were simply unable to make their
lar, the 2009 visit to Chicago by Ashraf Cassiem was pivotal in the
bond payments, as the majority had no jobs, and many house-
formation of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and its efforts to
holds consisted of multiple generations completely dependent
‘‘escalate and elevate” struggles against displacement. This specific
on a single pension or grant. Following the 1994 political tran-
phrase is often sounded by JR and shows up prominently in an
sition, those banks that sponsored the construction of these
interview with him conducted by Ken Salo as part of conversations
units continued to ignore the reported structural problems
with Chicago and South Africa activists. JR explains the impact of
and yielded to SERVCON for assistance with defaulters. SERV-
Cassiem’s visit thus:
CON, a parastatal institution jointly established by the govern-
ment and private banks to minimize the risks involved in Ashraf visited Cabrini Green. . . which is a very well organized
administering housing loans to low-income groups through a community. . .In that meeting he looked at me and said ‘‘I heard
guaranteed mortgage, proved useful as a tool to collect pay- you went to United Nation. Oh that’s nothing.” And I’m like
ments or expropriate housing for ‘‘nonperforming” housing ‘‘Whaat? You ever heard about Martin Luther King, Malcolm
loans. The seized units are resold for twice their original price, X, they talked about it, we did it!” And he’s like, ‘‘Yeah, you guys
while the owners, unable to pay their debts, are relocated to talked to ’em [the UN], right? And what happened?” I was like,
more remote and smaller accommodations referred to as ‘‘Nothing” [and Ashraf said] ‘‘Yeah right, thought so. . . Okay,
‘‘right-sized” homes, which are in substantially poorer condi- what’s your next step? ‘‘Like, it’s like you know you reached
tion than are the bond houses. the mountaintop, what is your next step? He went on and asked
[Miraftab and Wills, 2005: 203] us ‘‘OK, you went to the UN, you gotta switch up now JR, do
something else.” So we then decided that we wanted to change property and to unsettle the colonial conceit of proper and proper-
the ways in which we fought. tied human subjectivity?” In previous work (Roy, 2013, 2015), I
[Salo, 2014: 220] have suggested that poor people’s movements disrupt, but also
maintain, the apparatus of property. From slumdweller mobiliza-
In his discussions with me, JR had already noted both the tions in the global South to homesteading on the American urban
importance and limitations of his engagement with the UN and frontier, such movements present claims of rightful occupation
global frameworks of human rights. Instrumental in organizing a and legitimate ownership. In doing so, they often shed light on
2009 mission visit by the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate the inherent illegality of assured, state-sanctioned property rela-
Housing, Raquel Rolnik, JR knew that while the UN report indicted tions, but they also assert rights to those very same property rela-
the U.S. for racial discrimination in housing, ‘‘no blue helmets were tions. It is this dilemma that Porter (2014) dubs ‘‘possessory
going to embark on the streets of Chicago to defend human rights” politics,” noting that the ‘‘frame of possession” dominates struggles
or to stall the demolition of Cabrini Green. As Touissant Losier, co- to challenge dispossession and claim restitution. Similarly,
founder of the Chicago Anti-Eviction campaign reflects, ‘‘With the Krippner (2015) examines how the discourse of ownership has
U.N. able to do little to forestall threat of mass eviction, Fleming lis- come to dominate the politics of economic citizenship in late
tened to Cassiem and wondered how the WCAEC might serve as an 20th century America. For example, she argues that ‘‘the most sali-
example of how the poor could successfully mobilise to secure ent reaction to the foreclosure crisis has been framed in terms of
their own interests. . . Refusing to tow the line of polite, legal pro- the violation of individual property rights committed by banks that
test, [Cassiem] emphasized, had served the WCAEC well.” A ‘‘South did not conduct due diligence in initiating foreclosure proceedings”
Africa-style eviction blockade” followed days later (Losier, 2015). rather than in terms of ‘‘housing as a basic entitlement of citizen-
Cassiem echoed JR’s account, noting that in visiting Cabrini ship” (emphasis in the original). These dilemmas are amply evident
Green, he was struck by the similarity of the situations across Chi- in the politics of emplacement undertaken by the Chicago Anti-
cago and Cape Town but also by the ‘‘chilling limits” of American Eviction Campaign as it wages a home-by-home defense of domes-
politics. ‘‘I told them that they had to take down the boards, take ticity, ownership, and inhabitation. The herculean efforts by
back their homes, and take back their community,” he said. ‘‘If Timothy and Eugenia Lee to repurchase their foreclosed home is
there are homeless people on the streets of Chicago, why are there also an instantiation of such emplacement, one where disposses-
empty, boarded-up homes? But they were scared. It was as if sion is countered only through repeated sacrifice and where secure
Homeland Security had taken over their bodies and minds.” possession is always in a process of loss.
Losier (2015) argues that the ‘‘political resonance” of the Western Porter’s critique of possessory politics is not simply a concern
Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, in Chicago and elsewhere in the about the assertion of property rights or other forms of individual
world, lies in the latter’s ‘‘attempts to place non-collaboration at rights. Instead it is about personhood. She asks: ‘‘For what is to
the center of its struggles” against ‘‘regimes of neoliberal gover- become of those who cannot prove their worth across the thresh-
nance.” This ‘‘militant ethos,” Losier notes, has a long history in olds of recognition?” (Porter, 2014: 12) thereby returning us to the
South Africa itself, with ‘‘a political line running from the mid- subject who is always less than human, whose personhood, not
1930s” and recovered ‘‘ through the numerous student groups, just property is always in a process of loss. I will take up Porter’s
community programmes, workers’ organisations, and popular question in the concluding section of this essay. Here I want to
assemblies that would make up the Black Consciousness Move- briefly explore an additional argument presented by her: that
ment of the 1970s and 80s.” despite the logic of possession that haunts resistance or restitution
But for Cassiem, the activation of an urban politics of resistance politics, it might be possible to craft a ‘‘different language of prop-
and occupation in Chicago also had particular import for struggles erty” (Porter, 2014: 17). In doing so, I also advance an auto-
in Cape Town. ‘‘The visit to America had a purpose for me,” he critique, noting that in previous conceptualizations I failed to pay
emphasized. ‘‘The problem, you see, is not in South Africa. It’s in adequate attention to which notions of property are being
America. I wanted to go to the root of it, to the root of neoliberal advanced or dismantled by movements and their practices of
capitalism, to the University of Chicago where the policy was born. occupation.
It was created in Chicago and so it was there that it had to be dis- Porter’s call invokes the long-standing work of Blomley on the
mantled. Evictions were not really the point. It was about the mon- meanings and practices of property. While it is commonplace to
etization that had made us separate individuals. And so it was in associate property with ‘‘possessive individualism,” Macpherson’s
Chicago that I wanted to show up. It was there that we had to kill (1962) influential term, Blomley (2004: 9) insists that the ‘‘owner-
neoliberalism, rescind it, burn it. That’s where we had to shut down ship model” is only one of many ‘‘modalities” of property. Struggles
the Milton Friedman project. I thought that if we won in Chicago, against dispossession, he notes, often rely upon and create alterna-
we would automatically win in South Africa, we would win all over tive modalities, including those that are ‘‘made in the names of
the world. This is why winning in Chicago mattered for us.” It is communities, whether of interest or place.” I follow Blomley’s
thus that from the shacks of Cape Flats there emerged an imagina- provocation to think about property as ‘‘an important political
tion for occupying what Ashraf Cassiem calls the belly of the beast. vocabulary” rather than an established category of rule to return
The work of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign though has been to the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, and specifically to home
concerned with confronting and challenging not so much the orig- liberations and their politics of emplacement. What is at work is
inary forces of neoliberalism as the very foundations of liberalism, indisputably a logic of possession but it is not necessarily an enact-
i.e. the apparatus of property. ment of possessive individualism. Instead, collective labor, and to
some extent collective inhabitation of liberated homes, remain
5. ‘‘The apparatus of property key, albeit tenuous, components of emplacement. As these homes
are always in the process of loss, so there is also an ongoing process
In Dispossession: The Performative in the Political, Butler and of rehabilitation and reclamation. There are no property rights of
Athanasiou (2013) ask a question that is central to the purpose alienation or transfer here, a situation similar to the instances of
of this essay: ‘‘How might claims for the recognition of rights to homesteading analyzed by Blomley. But there are those of ‘‘use,
land and resources, necessarily inscribed as they are in colonially occupation, domicile, and inherent need” (Blomley, 2008: 316).
embedded epistemologies of sovereignty, territory, and property Most important, these rights are predicated on the deployment
ownership, simultaneously work to decolonize the apparatus of of labor, leading to an irony highlighted by Blomley (2004: 22):
‘‘thus it is, for example, that squatting activists and neoliberals ‘‘radical potential” because it ‘‘uses the ambiguous but universal
alike can cite John Locke.” identity of ‘humanity’ to make claims on the established terms of
There are at least two ways in which we can consider the collec- legitimate authority.” He sees this as related to, but distinct from,
tive aspects of the politics of emplacement. The first is to take human rights as a project of global liberal governance. What is at
account of how property rights come into being, which as stake here is how the project of asserting (collective) property
Blomley (2004: 11) argues, requires ‘‘state enforcement.” This of rights through emplacement is entangled with the work of assert-
course is the paradox at the very heart of liberalism: that if posses- ing (collective) personhood through human rights. That entangle-
sive individualism as an ontological claim to freedom rests on the ment, I argue, is a key part of the specificity of dis/possessive
tenet of property, then property itself depends on state power. In collectivism, a point I make more fully in the next section of this
discussing this logic of possession, Macpherson (1962: 256) thus essay.
eschews the divide between individualism and collectivism. Finally, there is the question of land. In 2009, a few months
‘‘Locke’s individualism,” he argues, ‘‘does not exclude but on the before Cassiem’s visit to Chicago, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction
contrary demands the supremacy of the state over the individual.” Campaign published an open letter in The Nation addressed to
It is precisely this relationship between property and state that ‘‘all poor Americans and their communities in resistance.” In it,
renders the politics of emplacement fragile, for it is unlikely, in South African activists addressed the ‘‘privatization of land” but
the U.S., that home liberations will be a viable pathway to housing also noted the racialized history of such dispossession: ‘‘Colonial-
rights. ism and apartheid dispossessed us of our land and gave it to whites
We are then left with the second aspect of collectivism, which to be bought and sold for profit.” The letter clarified the purpose of
following Krippner (2015), I call possessive collectivism. Krippner’s the movement: ‘‘While our actions may seem like a demand for
interest is in how the discourses of ownership invoking individual welfare couched in a demand for houses, social grants and water,
rights can embed claims in collectivities. Using the example of the they are actually a demand to end the commodification of things
community reinvestment moment, she notes that while the claims that cannot be commodified: land, labour and money” (http://
were of ownership, rather than of distribution, these possessive www.thenation.com/article/fighting-foreclosure-south-africa/).
claims were embedded in the frames of neighborhood and commu- This is a decolonial ontology, one that necessarily reframes the his-
nity. ‘‘Individuals who claimed a right to credit did so not on the tory and obligations of property and thus the meanings of dispos-
basis of their individual ownership of financial assets, but by virtue session and possession.
of their relationship to a community of individuals who were in the Yet, on the South Side of Chicago, in neighborhoods such as
aggregate property owners” (emphasis in the original). The chal- Auburn Gresham, the ontology of decolonization is uneasily
lenge of possessive collectivism, she concludes, is that ‘‘the collec- sutured with the politics of emplacement. Not only must the home
tive political project [can be] concealed by a highly individualized liberations negotiate possessory politics but also evictees such as
form of claims-making, with recipients asserting a contractual right the Lees seek resolution through the (re)purchase of property. Such
over property they appear to have accrued through personal toil contradictions lie at the heart of the political potentiality that is
and thrift rather than requesting a form of redistribution from dis/possessive collectivism. While I take up this matter more fully
the state” (emphasis in the original). Krippner’s work resonates in the concluding section of the essay, that difficult suturing is
with what Catherine Fennell (2015: 10–11, 13) calls the ‘‘physics clearly evident when there is a conceptual shift from the generic
of post-welfare care,” one in which ‘‘citizenly care” and ‘‘sympa- concept of land to the specific concept of plantation, as articulated
thy” became the ‘‘rights and obligations” of urban residents amidst by Katherine McKittrick (2013). In an essay titled ‘‘Plantation
the demolition of public infrastructures of welfare. While collec- Futures,” she writes;
tivism is possibly inflected with such citizenly care, I mean by it
‘‘It is through the violence of slavery, then, that the plantation
a set of claims and discourses that assert a ‘‘collective political pro-
produces black rootedness in place precisely because the land
ject” (Krippner’s phrase), either through collective action or
becomes the key provision through which black peoples could
through collective ontologies.
both survive and be forced to fuel the plantation machine.”
In the case of the Chicago-Anti Eviction Campaign, my research
points to three types of collectivism. The first is collective labor.
This is the work of home liberations and occupations and it is gen- 6. Racial banishment and the potentiality of dis/possessive
dered in significant ways. Many of the home liberators have been collectivism
mothers. Most recently, the movement has pivoted towards home
rehabbing by black youth. The latter has been accompanied by a ‘‘My sense is that language may fail us here.”
narrative of self-help. Thus fund-raising campaigns such as this [Athena Athanasiou in Butler and Athanasiou, Dispossession,
https://www.gofundme.com/dolton make the case for ‘‘fighting 2013: 5]
homelessness, neighborhood blight, and youth unemployment.”
As has been the case for several decades in the United States, the The case of the Lee eviction is a classic example of what Wyly
theme of youth employment, particularly that of black male youth, and Ponder (2011) have termed ‘‘subprime America.” While the
remains central to imaginations and practices of community devel- systematic production of the subprime crisis, and its distinctively
opment, closely linking self-help and self-determination (Roy, racialized instruments of predation and profit, are well known,
Schrader and Crane, 2015). and I will thus not rehearse them here, Wyly and Ponder (2011:
Second, the Chicago and South Africa movements, as well as 529) draw our attention to how ‘‘predatory practices in the sub-
related movements such as the LA Community Action Network, prime market were especially harmful for elderly African American
insist on a vocabulary and praxis of human rights. Eviction block- women, many of them widows.” Especially striking in their analy-
ades and home liberations are waged in the name of defending sis are the many examples of elderly African American women ‘‘liv-
human rights; JR presents himself as the enforcer of human rights; ing on fixed incomes in older homes, often entirely paid off, and in
members of the campaign enthusiastically endorse the human need of cash and credit for home repairs and other needs” and who
rights and global goals frameworks of the United Nations. Yet, were disproportionately targeted as subprime customers (Wyly
the movement is no simple expression of global liberalism. and Ponder, 2011: 539, 559). Such seems to be the story of Timothy
Hoover (2015: 1092) argues that the invocation of human rights Lee’s mother and the fateful $3,300 home improvement loan she
by the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign must be seen as having took out in 2010.
‘‘Subprime America” came sharply into view as a crisis during It is rather straightforward to apply the concept of banishment
the Great Recession and its devastating aftermath. But a growing to the expulsion of the homeless from American cities, or to park
body of work documents the persistence of evictions and foreclo- exclusion orders, or civil gang injunctions. I argue that it is also
sures well after the crisis has supposedly abated, noting that they useful to apply the concept to the case of evictions. As noted earlier
are perhaps more coercive than ever before. Thus Desmond (2016) in this essay, it is not sufficient to understand evictions as the
argues that evictions have become a key feature of American urban unfortunate workings of real-estate markets; instead they have
life. Specifically, Hiller (2013: 31) notes that in Chicago, tenants, to be understood as an instantiation of what Wyly et al. (2012)
despite paying rent, are being forced out of foreclosed buildings term the ‘‘racial state.” The emphasis on the role of the state or
by banks through ‘‘coercive methods such as turning off utilities, public means is crucial, be it histories of redlining or geographies
neglecting maintenance, and giving tenants misleading informa- of deregulation or the sheer physical act of enacting eviction. For
tion.” He estimates that since 2009, ‘‘over 50,000 rental units in example, JR and other members of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Cam-
Chicago have gone into foreclosure, predominantly in low- paign note that while the sheriff’s office has been reluctant to
income, minority neighborhoods.” Despite federal and state legis- implement evictions, especially pre-emptive ones, the District
lation and city ordinances protecting tenants from such evictions, Attorney’s office has placed considerable pressure on the sheriff
these ‘‘extralegal practices” continue. Not surprisingly, movements to execute evictions. More broadly, as Rolnik (2013: 1064) argues,
such as the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign seek to enforce tenant ‘‘it is through the wholesale intervention of central and local gov-
protection legislation. At times they are successful, as in the case of ernments that a massive spoliation of the assets of the poor has
the Trice family whose eviction was blocked by a court ruling. It is taken place, opening up new frontiers—land hitherto part of the
also now becoming evident that the market in ‘‘troubled home commons (such as public housing or traditional informal settle-
mortagages” is being restructured through the influx of private ments)—to financial investors.”
equity and hedge funds that are ‘‘emerging as aggressive liquida- But the question remains: in what ways are such forms of urban
tors” (Goldstein, 2015). This particular New York Times report banishment also racial banishment? Beckett and Herbert (2010:
draws attention to private equity firms such as Lone Star that are 34) note that these punitive techniques ‘‘are sometimes used to
capturing the market for distressed mortgages and that are now limit the mobility and rights of those whose principal ‘offense’ con-
facing complaints that they are ‘‘too quick to push homes into fore- sists of being poor, homeless, and/or of color.” But racial banish-
closure and are even less helpful than the banks had been in nego- ment also entails a more persistent racialization of space. If
tiating loan modifications with borrowers.” banishment is enacted to uphold the norms of ‘‘order” and ‘‘civility,
The Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign is keenly aware of such ” then it is necessary to recognize the social meanings associated
frontiers of risk, speculation, and profit. But it also deploys an anal- with these norms. Thus Ghertner (2011: 1168), in demonstrating
ysis of racial dispossession. Its history precedes the subprime crisis how slums in Delhi are designated as ‘‘zones of incivility and nui-
and is instead rooted in the organizing by Cabrini-Green residents sance,” draws on the work of Kristeva and McClintock to show how
against displacement. Taking my cues from the Chicago Anti- the desire to expunge the abject becomes ‘‘political processes of
Eviction Campaign, as well from related movements, such as the abjection—in this case the large-scale removal of slums as abject
LA Community Action Network (LA CAN), I seek to conceptualize objects/outsiders. Such is the case, JR would argue, with the forms
such displacement as racial banishment. Pete White, co-founder of ‘‘cleansing” underway in Chicago, from the demolition of public
of LA CAN, insists that the concept of gentrification is not sufficient housing to tenant evictions to war zones ruled by gun violence
to explain the forms of displacement – the sheer disappearance of (http://chicagoantieviction.org/2016/07/activist-says-displaced-
African-Americans – that are now underway in cities such as Los tenants-are.html).
Angeles. JR presents a global historical analysis of displacement, But as is evident from my use of the concept of city’s end, I am
situating current evictions on the South Side of Chicago as one of equally interested in forms of racial banishment that are not mass
numerous, worldwide iterations of apartheid and racial cleansing. evictions or visible forms of cleansing. As discussed earlier, I model
Patricia Hill of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign frames evic- the concept of city’s end after Li’s (2014) analysis of land’s end. Her
tions, including her own, as an instantiation of white supremacy. concern is with contexts where the enclosure of land does not take
Such narratives co-exist with, and are also somewhat divergent place through land grabs or evictions or a large development pro-
from Cassiem’s focus on the ‘‘beast,” the globalization of a project ject. Instead, she examines how indigenous highlanders in Sula-
of neoliberalization authored by Milton Friedman and enabled by wesi, Indonesia, privatized their common land to plant boom
American imperialism. crops, thereby generating ‘‘socially legitimate property rights” (Li,
Banishment is not new. Historically, it has been a form of crim- 2014: 95). She means land’s end in a dual sense: as the end of land
inal punishment as well as of political discipline (Badat, 2013). as a commonly held resource as well as a dead end where the pro-
What is of significance is the renewal of banishment at the urban mise of development was scarcely fulfilled through the private
scale. For example, Smith (2000) draws attention to gang free ownership and use of land. I read the Lee eviction as an example
zones that enact ‘‘civil banishment,” exiling gang members of city’s end. The attempted eviction by Charter One Bank can be
through ordinance. Particularly useful is an analysis of banishment understood as an instance of speeded-up extralegal forms of fore-
as ‘‘legally imposed spatial exclusion” by Beckett and Herbert closure. But the financial gains to be made from such a pre-emptive
(2010). They argue that ‘‘new urban control tools” aim to ‘‘banish eviction are trivial: at best the collection of mortgage insurance.
their targets from contested urban spaces for extended periods of The predation of a reactivated market in troubled home mortgages
time and rest on an innovative blend of civil, criminal, and admin- is not necessarily at work here, not as yet at least. The Lee home,
istrative law (Beckett and Herbert, 2010: 3). These practices, they like others that have been foreclosed in this part of the South Side,
note, are experienced as punishment, even imprisonment, and also would most likely lie vacant, boarded up, and be quickly looted and
prefigure and enable traditional punishment, such as criminal jus- stripped. Nor is Auburn Gresham in the crosshair of new plans and
tice sanction. Further, the logic of banishment is ‘‘expansionary” – projects for urban growth and expansion that might require a
‘‘many citizens are subjected to multiple exclusion orders, such blank slate strategy of emptying out homes. The taxi driver who
that much of the city becomes a ‘no go’ area for them (Beckett reluctantly dropped me off at the eviction rally, locking the car
and Herbert, 2010). Finally, Beckett and Herbert (2010) emphasize doors and trying to convince me to return to downtown Chicago,
‘‘the central role of the state’s coercive power” in such forms of saying ‘‘Sister, you will get killed here today, this is not a neighbor-
‘‘spatial ostracism.” hood you should be in, even in broad daylight,” emphasized that
even if a house were given to him at zero cost he would not live in torical conditions of slavery and those forms of possessive individ-
Auburn Gresham. Put bluntly, the Lees are not in the way. Their ualism that belong to capitalism?” (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013:
home is city’s end, its neatly trimmed hedges and quiet streetscape 7). A concept of racial banishment is thus an attempt to take into
transformed by mundane practices of loan fraud and mortgage account such relationalities, to understand how the foundational
insurance payouts rather than spectacular processes of primitive dispossession of certain subjects is constitutive of liberalism and
accumulation. The Lee home also marks city’s end in a second its economic geographies. It leads us to the question: what politics
sense of the term: that the struggles against evictions and foreclo- is possible outside the grid of secure possession and sovereign self?
sures at this location seek resolution, for example the repurchase of In this essay, provoked by the work of the Chicago Anti-Eviction
property. Campaign and its global interconnections, I have traced a political
It is this second meaning of city’s end that is particularly signif- potentiality that I term dis/possessive collectivism. Such politics, as
icant for a conceptualization of racial banishment. In their recent I have noted, links anti-eviction struggles to human rights. Such
article on mortgage debt, Garcia-Lamarca and Kaika (2016: 313) politics seeks to liberate homes from commodification while also
frame mortgages as a biotechnology, ‘‘an increasingly intimate practicing emplacement. Such politics uses postponement as a tac-
relationship between practices of everyday life and speculative tic but is also acutely aware of protracted histories of persistent
practices of global real estate and financial markets.” They also exclusion and deferred reparation. Put another way, the politics
note that the majority of their informants were engaged in negoti- of dis/possessive collectivism sutures contradictory elements in a
ating ‘‘a solution” such as refinancing or grace periods with the theory and practice of property and personhood. This is perhaps
bank (Garcia-Lamarca and Kaika, 2016: 321). It is precisely these most evident with the question of land which, as I have noted ear-
temporalities of postponement and these lived experiences of cruel lier, is a key aspect of dis/possessive collectivism.
optimism that are at work on the South Side of Chicago. But if we In The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois (1903: 27) draws
are to think about not only about the financialization of housing attention to the role of land in Reconstruction: ‘‘the work of estab-
but also the racialization of housing, as Garcia-Lamarca and Kaika lishing the Negroes as peasant proprietors.” The promise of land to
invite us to do, then in the context of the United States, such finan- ‘‘freedmen,” he notes was a ‘‘bitter disappointment” but it was also
cialization is necessarily constituted through racialization. That ‘‘the righteous and reasonable ambition to become a landholder.”
racialization, as I have already argued, is much more than racial DuBois (1903: 116) goes on to analyze the numerous ways in
discrimination and racial exclusion. It is about foundational dispos- which black farmers were to be entrapped by debt and lose their
session – the subject whose claims to personhood are tenuous and land, their farms stripped of ‘‘every single marketable article,––
whose claims to property are thus always a lived experience of mules, ploughs, stored crops, tools, furniture, bedding, clocks, look
loss. Take the case of the Lees. While they sought resolution, even ing-glass,––and all this without a warrant, without process of law,
expressing willingness to repurchase the home with a new $55,000 without a sheriff or officer, in the face of the law for homestead
mortgage, these negotiations soon fell apart. Recently, Charter One exemptions, and without rendering to a single responsible person
Bank hired a new realty company and property manager who any account or reckoning.” DuBois (1903: 116) concludes that
‘‘showed up with the police and a record of the eviction and the only explanation and ‘‘remedy” for such processes was that
demanded that they leave. In spite of this, the Lees are back in ‘‘we must accept some of the race prejudice in the South as a fact.”
the house and still attempting to purchase the home from the I connect Du Bois’s analysis of the ‘‘Black Belt” to what Mbembe
bank” (Losier, personal communication). It is this impossibility of (2003) and McKittrick (2013) designate as plantation. For Mbembe
financial resolution that requires an expanded understanding of (2003: 21), the plantation is a ‘‘political-juridical structure” defined
dispossession. by ‘‘the slave condition” which in turn ‘‘results from a triple loss:
Liberalism’s compass of property and personhood is usually loss of a ‘‘home,” loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of
read as possessive individualism. But it also needs to be read as political status.” The slave has value as property but otherwise suf-
what Harris (1993) has called the ‘‘whiteness as property.” She fers ‘‘social death” or ‘‘expulsion from humanity altogether.” Build-
means by this not only ‘‘racially contingent forms of property ing on, and yet departing from Mbembe’s analysis, McKittrick
and property rights” (1993: 1714) but also ‘‘the evolution of white- conceptualizes the plantation as a place of exploitation as well as
ness from color to race to status to property.” Harris (1993: 1780) of rootedness. As I have noted earlier, she conceptualizes land as
insists that challenging such racialized structures requires affirma- ‘‘the key provision through which black peoples could both survive
tive action that is not just corrective but rather distributive. For and be forced to fuel the plantation machine.”
such an impulse she turns to South Africa where ‘‘affirmative Such notions of land allow us to think with an expanded notion
action” has been a ‘‘strategic measure to address directly the distri- of dispossession as well as of collectivism. I thus interpret collec-
bution of property and power, with particular regard to the mald- tivism not as the antonym of individualism but instead in
istribution of land and the need for housing (Harris, 1993: 1790).” McKittrick’s (2011: 948) sense of a ‘‘collective history of encoun-
But also at stake here are intractable questions about personhood, ter,” what she describes as a ‘‘a difficult interrelatedness— that pro-
or what Butler and Athanasiou (2013: xi) pinpoint as the ‘‘sover- mises an ethical analytics of race based not on suffering, but on
eign self.” Whether it be possessive individualism or a universal human life.” This, I suggest, is what poor people’s movements nec-
humanity, the sovereign self is often a precondition for the claim- essarily do, for they must work with the ethics of human life rather
ing of rights, be it property rights or human rights. But who is than with the persistence of social death. Such too is Mbembe’s
authorized to be this sovereign self? Who has the historical per- (2011) call to think about democracy as a ‘‘community of life,” a
mission for such sovereignty? And what are the stable locations project that takes ‘‘the form of a conscious attempt to retrieve life
of home and land from which such a sovereign self can be and ‘‘the human” from a history of waste” (emphasis in the original).
deployed, represented, and performed? I ask these questions not Put broadly, dis/possessive collectivism is a political potentiality
to contrast the sovereign self with figures of unfreedom, such as forged in the context of racial banishment, a banishment that is
the slave. Instead, I want to draw attention to the constitution of predicated on the permanently insecure possession of property
freedom through unfreedom. In other words, contrast and consti- and personhood.
tutiveness are quite different relationalities. Butler thus asks: Finally, I must acknowledge that I borrow the specific term,
‘‘. . .What do we make of the idea that we have property in our dis/possessive collectivism, from debates about world literature,
own persons? Are persons forms of property, and would we be able or more specifically about the worlding of languages and litera-
to understand this legal formulation at all if it were not for the his- tures. In Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability,
Apter (2014), argues that World Literature ‘‘affirms a psychopolit- that many would see to be the hallmark of ethnography, my
ical structure of possessive collectivism.” She likens the canon – engagement with the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign, LA CAN,
and commodity – that is World Literature to ‘‘the world-class and the vestiges of the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign is
museum or art collection,” or perhaps what in urban studies we neither that of distance nor that of belonging. I started studying
can designate as the ‘‘world-class city”. Possessive collectivism, these movements with the specific research questions I stated at
for her, is nothing more than possessive individualism – ‘‘with its the outset of this essay: How do poor people’s movements stake
self-regarding notion of personhood (of ‘‘self” as self-ownership) claims to home and land? Do such claims generate new meanings
and happy fit with neoliberalism” – ‘‘scaled up to the proportions of property and personhood and thereby reconstitute the urban
of the World.” The uncanny resonance with Krippner’s conceptual- land question? But in my role as director of the Institute on
ization of possessive collectivism is apparent. But Apter puts for- Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin, I have also sought to
ward the possibility of dis/possessive collectivism. Drawing on amplify their narratives of struggle. Such work defies the familiar
Bruce Robbins’s idea of a dispossessive ethics of reading she argues formats of academic-community engagement such as co-
that such a stance casts ‘‘World Literatures as an unknowable state, production. The institute takes its conceptual cues from poor peo-
a literature over which no one asserts proprietary prerogative and ple’s movements, relying on their vocabulary for the analytical
which lends itself to a critical turn that puts the problem of prop- scaffolding of research and pedagogy. Yet it is not necessarily a
erty possession front and center.” I suggest that we carry over such direct participant in the collective action that animates these
a conceptual framework to critical urban theory and its analysis of movements. I would like to think of this as the unstable terrain
dispossession. As a political potentiality, dis/possessive collec- of solidarity but postcolonial critique makes me wary of such a
tivism challenges the ‘‘proprietary prerogative” at stake in the idea claim. This too is part of the collective history of encounter, the
and ideology of home and land. It is thus a politics of our time as ‘‘difficult interrelatedness” of the global university to poor people’s
well as a politics waged against the secure categories of person- movements. Dis/possessive collectivism is thus also an effort to
hood and property through which liberalism is constituted. rethink the ‘‘proprietary prerogative” of critical urban theory.
Alongside the questions, ‘‘What is to count as property?” and
‘‘Who can count as the subject who can claim home and land?”
7. Postcolonial postscripts is this question: ‘‘Who is the authoritative interlocutor of politics?”
In my first encounter with the legendary Pete White of LA CAN, I
I conclude with two postcolonial postscripts. First, in a provoca- asked how the institute can make itself useful. He answered: ‘‘Do
tive essay, Wyly (2015: 2534) draws attention to ‘‘gentrification as your work. Theory. History. We are telling you that what we are
a dimension of planetary urbanization” and notes the pervasive experiencing cannot any longer be explained as gentrification.
‘‘upward class transformation of urban space.” Equally important, We are experiencing banishment. Give us a theory of banishment.
he argues that recent iterations of critical urban theory have dis- Give us the history of banishment.” This essay is the first step in a
avowed the analysis of gentrification as a worldwide process. response to the task outlined by Pete White.
Wyly (2015: 2531) writes: ‘‘At precisely the moment when gentri-
fication is becoming truly transnational and powerfully planetary,
we are asked to liquidate the intellectual and political investments Acknowledgements
of generations of critical inquiry in favour of evolving theories of
‘globalized contingency’ that have now even attacked postcolonial This research was supported by the Meyer and Renee Luskin
theory itself as ‘hegemonic’ (Ong, 2011: 3, 8 in Wyly, 2015: 2531).” Chair in Inequality and Democracy at UCLA. I would like to thank
I am sympathetic to Wyly’s interest in a generalizable theory of Padraig Carmody for the invitation to present the Geoforum lecture
urban transformations, but as I have noted in reflections on urban at the 2016 AAG conference. Comments provided by two anony-
theory, generalization must not be confused with universalization mous reviewers were immensely helpful in organizing the key
(Roy, 2016). I interpret the conceptual and political shift from gen- arguments of the paper. I am honored that Nicholas Blomley, Asher
trification to racial banishment enacted by movements such as LA Ghertner, and Elvin Wyly were discussants for the AAG talk. Their
CAN and the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign as an effort to call work is central to the arguments presented here and I am grateful
into question universal (read: liberal) categories of property and for their thoughtful and generous commentaries. I also wish to
personhood. This, I would argue, is the significance of postcolonial thank a set of wonderful colleagues and friends for their critical
thought: to demonstrate how seemingly universal categories have engagement with this paper: Hannah Appel, Nik Heynen, Greta
been forged through historical difference. In recent work, I turn to Krippner, Helga Leitner, Libby Porter, Emma Shaw Crane, Eric
early writings by postcolonial theorists such as Guha (1996) to Sheppard, Nik Theodore, and Chris Tilly. Needless to say, none of
foreground how the ‘‘rule of property” was ‘‘bent backwards” in this research and analysis would have been possible without the
the matrix of colonial administration, quickly reaching epistemic inspiration provided by Ashraf Cassiem, JR, Toussaint Losier, and
and political limits (Kumar and Roy, 2017). In this particular case, Pete White.
that of the Permanent Settlement of 1793 in Bengal, the settlement
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Dis/possessive collectivism: Property and personhood at city’s end

1. Home and land

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