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Mae Miller-Likhethe
Aaron Mallory
This panel explores the queer temporalities and counter-cartographies of making home as a practice of freedom. Drawing upon recent scholarship in abolitionist geography, postcolonial urbanism, Black feminism, and queer of color critique, the session grapples with transnational and transhistorical approaches to making “home” as process of collective, fugitive, and revolutionary world-making while challenging dominant articulations of detritus and the “uninhabitable.”
Situated within Black feminism and anti-colonial internationalism, Mae Miller-Likhethe’s paper develops “safe harbors” as an analytic for understanding the intimate cartographies and mutual aid practices among Afro-Caribbean and South Asian maritime workers in boarding houses of interwar NYC and London, UK. Debanuj DasGupta’s explores the friendship networks of LGBTQ refugees from Syria, Russia, Ukraine, and Afghanistan in Buenos Aires, Argentina, arguing that affective bonds transcend state agencies and imperatives while highlighting the importance of South-South locations for queer migration studies. Aaron Mallory’s paper expands on queer of color considerations of the home and subject formation and develops an understanding of Black placemaking practices among Southern US Black subsistence farmers after slavery, before reconstruction. Sa Whitley’s paper draws upon Black feminist ethnographic research in Baltimore, Maryland to show how collectives of former subprime mortgage debtors that have reconceptualized home, private property, and urban planning in opposition to speculative urbanism and examines the ways that Black queer and transgender women figure real estate markets as sites of subjection and possibility in the afterlife of the 2008 subprime foreclosure crisis. Finally, Dani Aiello’s paper examines the anti-racist and anti-colonial potential of tenant organizing through a comparative analysis across sites of extreme housing exploitation: the single-room occupancy (SRO) and extended-stay hotels of Atlanta, Georgia and Vancouver, Canada. A contradictory cartography of severe precarity and uninhabitability alongside deep relationalities and generative livingness, this paper considers what tenant power may (re)possess toward an abolitionist politics of place and home.