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Proofs of my forthcoming book with Duke – For a Liberatory Politics of Home – out Nov 23

I am now concluding the editing of the proofs of my forthcoming book, For a Liberatory Politics of Home, out with Duke University Press in November 2023.

I worked on this text on and off for more than ten years, from my Ph.D. to a number of other entanglements. In the book, I develop an argument around the impossible possibility of ‘home’ and the colonies of the homely, in order to construct a way of thinking beyond the violent epistemic and material entrapments of the binary home/homelessness. I work with processual, feminist, and autonomous thinking, and I ground the argument in my Italian ethnographic research but also in years of engagement with debates and struggles around housing justice across the Atlantic.

If you want to know more, a preliminary page is available here: https://www.dukeupress.edu/for-a-liberatory-politics-of-home

The book will be out in November 2023. I am extremely grateful to the people at Duke for their incredible editorial steer and dedication, to Ananya Roy and Katheryne Brickell for unparalleled insights, to my brother AbdouMaliq Simone and to Leo for pushing me to write this thing, and to many others, whom I thank in the volume itself.

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Grammar of the Urban Ground – new book with Ash Amin for Duke

“Grammars of the Urban Ground“, the book I co-edited with Ash Amin for Duke University Press, is now out at https://www.dukeupress.edu/grammars-of-the-urban-ground

Get 30% off the paperback with code E22GRMMR, and check in the coming weeks for the Open Access version of this volume at https://read.dukeupress.edu/ (thanks to the support of the British Academy).

This book has been many years in the making. It started with a series of workshops organised by Ash at the BA (as far as 2018 if I remember well), and it germinated into a remarkable compendium of critical urban lexicons from authors that have been foundational to my own urban thinking (see table of content below).

What came out is a – open-access – helpful text for students and scholars interested in grounded, yet experimental, ways of tracing the multiple politics of urban life – from banishment to social junk, from density to transitoriness, from suturations to deformation and to affirmation.

Thanks to Ash for having me in this, to all our authors for the great texts, to the BA for the support and to Courtney Berger at Duke for her wonderful editorial steer.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Thinking Cities from the Ground / Ash Amin and Michele Lancione
1. Social Junk / Natalie Oswin
2. Grammars of Dispossession: Racial Banishment in the American Metropolis / Ananya Roy
3. Future Densities: Knowledge, Politics, and Remaking the City / Colin McFarlane
4. Big: Rethinking the Cultural Imprint of Mass Urbanization / Nigel Thrift
5. Urban Legal Forms and Practices of Citizenship / Mariana Valverde
6. Transitoriness: Emergent Time/Space Formations of Urban Collective Life / Teresa Caldeira
7. Suturing the (W)hole: Vitalities of Everyday Urban Living in Congo Filip De Boeck
8. Infrastructures of Plutocratic London / Caroline Knowles
9. Affirmative Vocabularies from and for the Street / Edgar Pieterse and Tatiana Thieme
10. Deformation: Remaking Urban Peripheries through Lateral Comparison / AbdouMaliq Simone
11. Edge Syntax: Vocabularies for Violent Times / Suzanne M. Hall