In For a Liberatory Politics of Home, Michele Lancione questions accepted understandings of home and homelessness to offer a radical proposition: homelessness cannot be solved without dismantling current understandings of home. Conventionally, home is framed as a place of security and belonging, while its loss defines what it means to be homeless. On the basis of this binary, a whole industry of policy interventions, knowledge production, and organizing fails to provide solutions to homelessness but perpetuates violent and precarious forms of inhabitation. Drawing on his research and activism around housing in Europe, Lancione attends to the interlocking crises of home and homelessness by recentering the political charge of precarious dwelling. It is there, if often in unannounced ways, that a profound struggle for a differential kind of homing signals multiple possibilities to transcend the violences of home/homelessness. In advancing a new approach to work with the politics of inhabitation, Lancione provides a critique of current practices and offers a transformative vision for a renewed, liberatory politics of home.
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. The Problem of Lessness 1
Part I
1. The Subject at Home 25
2. Expulsion and Extraction 43
Part II
3. Italian Ritornellos 69
4. A Local Violence 99
5. A Global Culture 131
Part III
6. The Micropolitics of Housing Precarity 173
7. Deinstitute, Reinstitute, Institute 195
Conclusion. Beyond Inhabitation 223
Notes 233
Bibliography 257
Index 279
