Home as violent settler infrastructure: Extending Lancione's Liberatory Politics of Home

For a Liberatory Politics of Home offers a compelling and carefully structured intervention into the politics of dwelling. Lancione's use of four ritornellos to organize the book is particularly effective. They are “the four overlapping violent ritornellos are those of anthropocentrism, racialization, heteronormalization, and capitalization” (Lancione, 2025: 48). Through these four ritornellos, home is progressively unsettled: as a bordering device, then as an extractive formation. The effect is cumulative. Lancione suggests possible reworkings after tearing down.

I find myself strongly aligned with this central intervention. Lancione persuasively demonstrates that home cannot be treated as a natural or universal good. It is a spatial formation that organizes belonging and expulsion, moral “goodness” and deviance. By foregrounding “inhabitation” as something defined by those doing it, as well as wanting to foreground the politics of inhabitation. He reorients housing discourse away from technocratic and policy solutions and toward autonomy and collective self-determination.

The discussion of anarchist squatting movements is especially generative in this regard. Drawing on Vasudevan's notion of “make + shifts,” Lancione presents inhabitation as assembled from within: a lived politics rather than an externally imposed arrangement. As Vasudevan (2015) argues, squatting should be understood not merely as a tactic of shelter acquisition, but as a prefigurative spatial practice that assembles alternative forms of dwelling and inhabitation. This framing resonates strongly with insurgent housing practices that treat hom-ing practices as collective world-making rather than service provision (Martínez, 2024).

My own experience organizing within squatting campaigns in Philadelphia similarly underscores this point (Johnson, 2022). What began as extra-legal occupation evolved, through sustained collective struggle, into a community land trust that has now held land in common for more than 5 years. The process did not simply secure shelter; it reworked relations to property, where we are stewards of the land and work collectively to maintain it. We seek to live in alignment with it. Lancione's emphasis on inhabitation as self-definition provides a conceptual vocabulary for practices that many organizers should be enacting, practices that destabilize the assumption that home must be mediated through real estate markets or state service provisions.

Building from the architecture of the four ritornellos, several avenues for further development emerge. One concerns imperial genealogies. The ritornellos effectively trace how home becomes naturalized within contemporary urban contexts, yet the longer arc of its consolidation alongside colonial expansion and racial slavery could be further foregrounded. As Cedric Robinson (1983) argues, capitalism is racial from its inception; domestic stability in one location has historically depended upon dispossession elsewhere. The sanctification of private property, the moralization of nuclear domestic family space, and the boundary between public and private were consolidated alongside imperial extraction. Situating the ritornellos more explicitly within this imperial history would sharpen the global stakes of the argument and connect the politics of home to ongoing struggles over land, sovereignty, and Indigenous self-determination.

While Chapter Three situates home within imperialism and racial capitalism, I want to push the argument one step further. If home operates as a bordering device and extractive formation, it may also function as a “violent settler infrastructure.” It is not simply to say that housing systems are shaped by colonial history. It is suggested that domestic space itself stabilizes ongoing violence and occupation.

Legal and political geographers have demonstrated that property regimes are foundational to settler sovereignty. Blomley (2003, 2004) shows how surveying, titling, and enclosure operate as spatial techniques of dispossession, while Bhandar (2018) argues that racial regimes of ownership materialize colonial occupation through the sanctification of private property. Extending this line of thought, Roy (2017) describes contemporary urban governance as a regime of racial banishment, in which property and personhood are intertwined and racialized populations are expelled through rental pricing and debt, policing, and legal evictions and foreclosure. Read through this lens, mortgage finance, land use law, and morality appear as technologies of territorial consolidation. The single-family home and the protected suburb then make dispossession commonplace and necessary.

This is where the analytic vocabulary of colonial governmentality becomes useful. In Colonising Egypt Mitchell (1988) demonstrates how colonial modernity operates by reorganizing space into legible interiors and exteriors and a series of enclosures that produce compliant citizens. Home, in this sense, is not “home,” but a spatial technology. It generates the distinction between inside and outside, belonging and threat, citizen and trespasser. If Lancione shows how home sorts and extracts, a settler-colonial inflection would show how it stabilizes territorial claim and reproduces the appearance of permanence.

To call home a violent settler infrastructure is therefore to name the background condition that makes its intimacy possible. Domestic security for some has historically depended upon the displacement, containment, or elimination of others—through plantation geographies, Indigenous land theft, racial zoning, and carceral management. Violence is ordinary. The home's apparent innocence is precisely what makes it infrastructural. We would then question whether it is even possible for some people.

This extension does not depart from Lancione's liberatory politics. It clarifies its stakes. If home is a settler infrastructure, then liberation cannot mean merely expanding access to existing property forms. It requires reworking the territorial logics that undergird them.

A second extension concerns the material conditions of autonomy. The final ritornello, centered on autonomy and self-determination, deliberately resists prescriptive closure. This restraint is one of the book's strengths. It avoids replacing one normative model of home with another and remains attentive to the risks of blueprint politics. At the same time, autonomy is never purely conceptual. As Derickson (2015) reminds us, community geographies are sustained through infrastructures of mutual accountability. Under what conditions can autonomy be realized within deeply entrenched property regimes? What material arrangements—tenant unions, land trusts, encampment self-governance—are necessary to sustain self-determination beyond symbolic refusal? These questions extend rather than challenge Lancione's framework; they push the final ritornello toward institutional form and something sustainable.

It is in this context that unconditional shelter becomes particularly significant. If the earlier ritornellos demonstrate how home functions as a moral sorting device—rewarding normative family structure, sobriety, wage labor, and compliance—then conditional access risks reproducing precisely those disciplinary logics. Requirements tied to surveillance, behavioral mandates, or moral assessment reinscribe home as evaluative threshold. Unconditional shelter, by contrast, begins from a different premise: that dwelling is not something to be earned through respectability. It suspends the frameworks through which the home has historically sorted populations. In this sense, unconditionality is less a policy instrument than a political stance—a refusal to tether survival to compliance. Such a stance aligns with abolitionist geographies that treat housing not as scarcity to be managed, but as life-affirming infrastructure (Gilmore, 2007).

Finally, the ritornellos also invite attention to embodiment. While home is convincingly analyzed as a bordering and extractive technology, the bodily dimensions of this bordering remain largely implicit. Drawing on Fanon (1967) account of racial epidermalization and Black geographies more broadly (McKittrick, 2006), we might consider how each return to home is also a return to the body. Eviction does not simply displace individuals spatially; it reorganizes breath, sleep, posture, and one's sense of futurity. Surveillance policing recalibrates how thresholds are crossed and interiors inhabited. If the ritornello marks repetition with difference, then the body is one site where that difference is registered—where home's violence and its reworking are lived somatically. Bringing this dimension more explicitly into the analytic would deepen the affective force of the argument.

Ultimately, For a Liberatory Politics of Home should be read not as a closed thesis but as a carefully composed movement one that returns to home in order to unsettle it. The four ritornellos do not resolve the question of dwelling; they make it impossible to approach innocently. The four openings they create around imperial entanglement, material autonomy, unconditionality, and embodiment are generative spaces for continued scholarly and political work. In that sense, the book performs what it advocates: it invites collective reworking rather than prescriptive closure.