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

Abstract

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.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Environment and Planning C Politics and Space, 2026 · DOI ↗