Home, Race, and Reparative Critique: Deploying the Ambivalence of Home in Social and Political Theory

Abstract

This article argues that social and political—and particularly antiracist, anticolonial, and feminist—theories have a tendency to frame home as a useful concept for critical theorizing only to the degree that home is idealized into a site of belonging and liberatory identity or castigated as a site of exclusion and oppression. In contrast, this article argues that there is a specific critical force that can come from emphasizing the ambivalence of home. It argues that emphasizing the ambivalence that marks many, and perhaps all, iterations of home can specifically offer what, with Eve Kosfoky Sedgwick, the article will call a “reparative” critical power that exists in how such homes call into question overly simplistic visions of either belonging or of otherness and, consequently, can call into question oppressive structures built to enforce these visions. In particular, it points to how, if a “paranoid” idealizing or demonizing of home supports or parallels racist forms of thinking and organizing, then a more ambivalent conception of home might serve as a source of a reparative critical power that might contest that thinking and that order.