Eternal chattel? Or, how to live in a moveable house when liberal time isn’t enough

Examining the ways that a redistributive politics of possession is haunted by Lockean moral claims regarding land, this paper is a conceptual exploration of the entanglement of land possession and race as mercurial artifacts of colonialism. Thinking from the Caribbean reveals the need for a mode of storying that exposes and undoes the colonial boundary-making on land and bodies that produced these artifacts. I explore this first through the contradictory capacity of moveable houses in Jamaica to stay put because they can move. Rejecting the habitually truncated narration of Caribbean histories and places, I then put the wood house in relation to deeper timescales and broader geographies of archipelagic placemaking. In doing so, I consider the wood house as a guide towards the commensurability of anticolonial projects to live land otherwise. Ultimately, the house’s capacity for motion signals not merely the power of (dis)possession, but an ongoing relational potentiality.