The Politics of Performing House: Transnational Perspectives

Abstract:Asking, What is the relationship between housing and performance?, editors Laura Levin and Sunita Nigam insist that the lines between the two begin to blur when we attend to the aesthetic and embodied dimensions of housing, on the one hand, and the homely, spatial, and thematic concerns of certain performances, on the other. Considering contexts of housing crises, shortages, and discrimination, the editors argue that houses of all kinds must be treated as processual, performative practices and as intended and unintended displays that reveal much about the material contexts in which they are embedded. As important zones for the realization, rehearsal, thwarting, or abandonment of private and collective fantasies, all houses are ‘dream houses,’ whether these dreams be good or bad. Levin and Nigam make a case for paying attention to aesthetic references, movement vocabularies, narratives about housing, scripts for housing practices, and the gendering and racializing of certain roles—all aspects of ‘practising house’—that make spaces (real and imagined) meaningful for those who perform them and spectate them. They argue for the importance of reading housing practices both in relation to local conditions and through transnational and hemispheric frameworks, asserting that the performative politics of housing brings into view shared experiences of dwelling, citizenship, and belonging that cross—and, more crucially, contest—geopolitical borders. In doing so, they emphasize how housing practices are haunted by the rupture that colonization created with existing Indigenous modes of dwelling, especially as a consequence of establishing settler-colonial territory and domestic spaces.