Rethinking the Politics of Belonging : Towards a Theory of Improper Community

Develops an original understanding of community as asserting a common world rather than an exclusive identity, ethnicity or territory.

Community has conventionally been understood as a unifying property (identity, ethnicity, territory) that establishes relations of belonging and non-belonging. However, that understanding necessarily causes exclusion and disenfranchisement, contradicting the idea of being together community implies. Through an original dialogue between four major thinkers (Jean-luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig), Kevin Inston presents an alternative account of community which affirms its irreducibility to property and resistance to appropriation so that it remains available to diverse identities, practices and opinions. Improper communities promote a shared world in which everyone counts equally. Rethinking the Politics of Belonging examines the strategies for refusing enclosure of the common, the rules and principles that could prevent identarian politics, and the ethos and public things that could affirm community as sharing rather than property. Exploring examples including Black Lives Matters, proto-feminist movements and recent housing and ecological occupations, it demonstrates how improper communities could reinvigorate democracy by enacting and defending universal freedom and equality.