Space seems limited these days, limited and limiting. The places we inhabit can inhabit us, leaving our imaginations of how to live otherwise too constrained to resist the tendencies of hoarding, hunting, and fencing that define our ideals, feeding habits of homemaking that have soaked the American Dream in so much violence. Rather than letting go of what’s not working for us, we’re taught to hold tight to all we can hold, as if hoarding more than there’s time to manage, use, or enjoy will make us more safe, more at home.
What if what makes us feel at home is holding us hostage? Can homemaking become a liberating practice, or is isolation the only answer? This talk is a meditation on the maternal wisdom teachings of Poverty Scholars whose practices of homemaking lead to radical realizations of how we build with ourselves, each other, and the land in ways that resist the hold of settler colonial logics of private property, domination, and patriarchy, that free us from isolation and into interconnection, and seed radical revisions of the American Dream beyond its reliance on displacement.
Jasmine Syedullah, PhD
Vassar College
Convening Faculty
Jasmine Syedullah is a black feminist political theorist of abolition, as well as co-author of Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation (North Atlantic Books, 2016). She holds the first … MORE