Domestic Scenes of Loss

Abstract

Domestic Scenes of Loss stages an encounter with the “residence without residents” or visual trope of the emptied domestic sites of capital (dis)investment as they have dis/re/appeared across different cultural terrains and situates these sites within the longue durée of US racialized capitalist dispossession. All four chapters of this dissertation share a critical preoccupation with representational regimes of the “domestic scene” – the enduring and culturally mediated image of the home – as an entry point into questions on material dispossession, disappeared bodies, and the informal archives that register their traces. Each chapter hones in on representations of different racial geographies – from the mid 20th c Harlem tenement to the repossessed storage locker and foreclosure house in 21st c neighborhoods of the racialized US urban poor and also to the increasingly data-extracting US-Mexico borderlands where migrating bodies make (temporary) home and place in the face of necropolitical governance. While this may appear a random assortment of sites, I contend that each can be read as a mediated domestic scene of loss that registers the twinned violences of documentation (representation) and erasure, and preserves the “ruins” or detritus of capitalist predation with which we can attempt to reckon with the story of the scene, not as it was but as what Lisa Lowe describes as “what could have been,” which “symbolizes aptly the space of a different kind of thinking, a space of productive attention to the scene of loss...” (Intimacies 40). Most of this project takes place in the 21st c where dominant US cultural forms frame or stage the material consequences of debt and dispossession as episodic events, temporary crisis, or even as economic opportunity, which is conducive to a colonial racial capitalist worlding that subtends the private property regime in the US. This project’s central argument is that the colonial racial capitalist worlding that underwrites property and naturalizes the violences that make property possible mobilizes a visual grammar to inculcate readers with a “sense of property” or ideological and affective orientation towards property, primarily on the intimate scale of the “home.” But property is never innocent nor is it natural since it must be continuously reproduced and remade in the collective imaginary. My project is premised on the idea that this remaking of property, which is at the same time a delimiting of what is possible in terms of social relationality under the contemporary private property regime, is often performed under the aegis of home-making and its material infrastructures – from the juridical backing of property law that authorizes and legitimates the instantiation of property to the consumer economy that makes industry of the inscription of this “interior” space – and its discursive repertoires or dominant cultural forms and idioms that naturalize property and colonize how we visually, affectively, and temporally experience the domestic. Working against this dominant staging of the scene, my project turns to fiction and develops its own method for (re)reading the emptied domestic sites as registering loss but also offering different modes of experiencing or dwelling in the domestic scene through loss.