Jasmine Wallace

This article develops the concept of familiar embodiment to describe moments of bodily ease, attunement, and relational knowing that emerge within the ongoing weather of anti-Blackness. Drawing on Frantz Fanon’s account of muscular dreams, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the body schema, and critical phenomenological work by Christina Sharpe, Sara Ahmed, Helen Ngo, and Tina Campt, the article argues that Black embodiment cannot be understood solely through injury, vigilance, or constraint. Alongside these realities, there are lived practices through which bodies recalibrate, move with one another, and cultivate minor forms of ease. Familiar embodiment names these recalibrations as both phenomenological and epistemic: They are ways of inhabiting the body and of knowing in relation. The article further introduces regard as an ethical and perceptual practice that sustains such livability without demanding legibility or transparency. Rather than treating liberation as a distant horizon, the article shows how fleeting gestures, shared atmospheres, and everyday attunements enact freedom in the present tense. In doing so, it offers a phenomenology of Black life that foregrounds relation, opacity, and lived possibility within conditions of constraint.

To live amid refusal—to seek shelter in a world that denies it—is the condition of racialized dwelling. The effort to make a home, to orient oneself within histories of dispossession and displacement, is never simply about geography. It is an ethical and affective practice of survival. For those whose belonging has been repeatedly revoked, “home” is not a settled fact but an ongoing negotiation between loss and endurance. What forms of living, care, and critique become possible when home must be continually remade in the wake of its refusal?Within this broader context, this special issue of Critical Philosophy of Race, “Bodies Without Shelter: Racialized Dwelling and the Ethics of Refusal,” extends that conversation. Across its articles, the question of home moves through affective, spatial, and phenomenological registers: Helen Ngo examines the tensions of flesh and place in racialized subjectivity; Lori Gallegos traces the affective coercions of national belonging; Eyo Ewara rethinks the uncanny as a mode of racial estrangement; and Jasmine Wallace explores familiar embodiment as a practice of relational attunement. Together, they ask what it means to inhabit worlds that have long denied one’s capacity to dwell—and how refusal itself might become a practice of living otherwise.The modern world’s categories of “home” and “body” are entangled in histories of expropriation and possession. To speak of racialized dwelling is to speak of the social order that rendered some bodies unhouseable—displaced, enslaved, and made fungible—and others as secure, legible, and at ease. As theorists such as Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter have shown, colonialism and racial capitalism redefined both geography and subjectivity: the colonized became the unhomely, confined to zones of nonbeing, while the colonizer’s habitation of the world was made to appear natural. In this sense, the body itself became the first house of exclusion, the ground upon which racial modernity built its metaphysics of property, identity, and belonging.If the body has been the primary site of dispossession, it is also the site through which new forms of dwelling emerge. The articles gathered here take seriously the body’s double valence as the locus of racialized refusal and as the medium through which new modes of belonging can be enacted. To remake the home, these authors suggest, is not to restore a lost origin but to inhabit instability, to cultivate an ethical orientation toward vulnerability, relation, and resistance. This is what the title “Bodies Without Shelter” names: not homelessness as lack but a shared effort to imagine and inhabit other ways of being at home.The articles in this volume take up these questions in distinct but overlapping ways. Helen Ngo’s “Home and Its Refusals: Tensions of Flesh and Place in the Racialized and Diasporic Subject” begins from the phenomenological problem of racialized alienation. Drawing on the insights of Merleau-Ponty and Fanon, Ngo argues that to live as a racialized subject is to experience the body as confiscated: One’s own flesh becomes a site of foreign occupation. For diasporic subjects, the sense of “home” is thus always shadowed by the persistence of displacement. Yet Ngo refuses both nostalgia and assimilation. Instead, she calls for an ethics of refusal—a recognition that to refuse belonging on colonial terms can itself be a way of reinhabiting the body and reconfiguring the world.Lori Gallegos’s “Love It or Leave It: Latinx People and the Pressure to Affectively Assimilate” turns to the affective dimension of national belonging. She interrogates the injunction that immigrants and racialized citizens must love the nation that marginalizes them. This demand, she argues, enforces not only behavioral assimilation but affective assimilation: a command to feel gratitude for what is, at best, conditional inclusion. Through a Latinx feminist lens, Gallegos examines how this emotional labor produces psychic dissonance and estrangement, exposing the limits of liberal inclusion. Her analysis foregrounds the double bind of love and critique. Her work asks how to inhabit spaces that wound without reproducing their emotional economies.Eyo Ewara’s “Home, Race, and Reparative Critique: Deploying the Ambivalence of Home in Social and Political Theory” reinterprets the Freudian das Unheimliche (uncanny) as a racialized affect that both disrupts and sustains critique. Reading Fanon and Freud alongside Saidiya Hartman, Ewara describes racialized being as an “uncanny familiarity”: One is both at home and not at home in the categories of the human. The unheimlich, in this sense, captures the psychic texture of racial modernity as a world that renders Black and colonized subjects as spectral, too close and too distant at once. Ewara’s account transforms estrangement into a resource for thought: a condition that makes dwelling possible otherwise through the creative inhabitation of unhomeliness.Jasmine Wallace’s “From Muscular Dreams to Familiar Embodiment: Black Life in the Wake” extends this conversation through a phenomenology of attunement. Against the presumption that racialized embodiment is always fractured or defensive, Wallace examines moments of bodily ease—instances of recognition and belonging that arise in fleeting, everyday gestures. Drawing on Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, Helen Ngo, and Christina Sharpe, she theorizes familiar embodiment as a form of regard: a mode of relational life that cannot be reduced to visibility or possession. Where Ngo articulates refusal as ethical withdrawal, Wallace explores attunement as a counterdispossession—the quiet remaking of the world through shared, lived gesture.Taken together, these articles compose a topology of racialized dwelling that is affective, embodied, and critical. Each offers a distinct vantage on the question of what it means to live “without shelter”: Ngo locates refusal in the body’s disaffection, Gallegos in the emotional economies of belonging, Ewara in the uncanny temporality of racial critique, and Wallace in the fragile attunements that make familiar life possible within estrangement.To dwell otherwise, to live amid refusal, is to resist the fantasy that home is ever secure. The articles in this issue approach home and body not as sites to be reclaimed but as scenes of ongoing negotiation. Refusal here is not mere negation; it is an ethical practice, a way of making livable what has been denied. Across these articles, home becomes a site of critical invention rather than restoration. The body becomes not an inheritance but a method of world-making.

ABSTRACT This article concerns the ways in which Afropessimist Calvin Warren misuses and overextends both Wynter’s historiography of the Human and Hartman’s concept “fungible commodity.” First, Calvin Warren flattens the ontology of the political subject described in Wynter’s concept “genres of Man” to argue that the contemporary Black US person exists as “being,” that is, non-being. Second, Warren misaligns with Wynter’s account of the period of historical rupture between the Human and nonhuman. Whereas, for Wynter, this rupture was constituted by the colonial encounter in the Americas, Warren cites chattel slavery as the event wherein the Human and Other, specifically the Black Other, were torn apart. Third, Warren’s use of “fungible commodity” when referencing the contemporary Black lacks a historiographical framework that would account for the continued non-being of Black existence as commodity post-emancipation.

Responding to the long-standing debate concerning whether Michel Foucault is a philosopher or a historian, Amy Allen questions the incompatibility that this opposition suggests. Foucault can be considered neither a historian nor a philosopher in isolation. Rather, given his own account of history and critique in his early text, The Order of Things, we should understand Foucault as a philosopher whose critical interventions are historically contingent. This commentary asks about the role of linguistics in critical theory, as it is the third counterscience listed alongside ethnology and psychoanalysis. Does a Foucault-inspired critical theory privilege the linguistic turn, even above and beyond the critical potential of either psychoanalysis or ethnology? Secondly, this commentary questions the truly critical power of Foucauldian critique in light of a defanged postcolonial theory, which is partially rooted in Foucauldian thought. Specifically, this commentary asks whether Edward Said, a postcolonial theorist explicitly influenced by Foucault, should be considered emblematic of this Foucauldian critique despite Said's complete assimilation into the status quo.

Recordar: To remember; from the Latin re-cordis, to pass back through the heart.Forgetting is not secondary; it is not an improvised failing of what has first been constituted as memory. Forgetfulness is a practice.In his search for a community that does not rely upon the false unities of subjectivity or identity, Maurice Blanchot looks to literature and writing. To achieve the common in community, Blanchot argues for the development of unworking writing practices aimed at the silence anterior to language—a silence that constitutes authentic communication. Instead of abiding by the rules of grammar, Blanchot encourages writers to produce fragments, which constitutes one method of unworking writing. This...