Residences, restitutions and resistance

Based on my experience as an organizer and militant researcher for the FCDL—Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire [Common Front for Housing Rights]—in Bucharest, I propose a critical analysis of post-socialist property redistribution by emphasizing the role of Westernizing aspirational paradigms. Supported by findings of colleagues and comrades from similar organizations in Romania, I argue that restitutions are a key process for understanding the aspirational, racializing dynamics of property redistribution in post-socialism through their hegemonic narrative of restoring a pre-communist, ‘European’ class composition. I seek to build a situated scholar-activist perspective anchored in the experience and testimony of evictions produced by restitutions. Placing the resistance of the Vulturilor community in Bucharest, a mixed Romanian-Roma community, as the starting point of my analysis, I argue that the tactics of encampments run by evictees in the Romanian context are in fact a radical form of protest that breaks with standards of protest as formulated in normative Western narratives. By going beyond the conventional categories of ‘the concerned citizen’ to be found in some right to the city type of movements in the region, the strategies of evictees push the boundaries of radicalism and solidarity. At the same time, they make space for a protest practice outside of the civilizational narratives of Western becoming, breaking the aspirational paradigm of becoming a white middle-class West. Such struggles break with historical property regimes based on continous racialized dispossesions, setting a new threshold for political anti-racist struggles that go beyond the cultural.