Homelessness

In contemporary society, homelessness has sparked the modern imagination. It is the subject of psychoanalytical theories and modern and poststructural philosophies, as well as so-called hobo literature. It is also the bane of policy makers and urban planners. Theorists have treated homelessness philosophically in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the mark of modernity, including views ranging from Friedrich Nietzsche and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to Gaston Bachelard and George Lukács, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Homi Bhaba, Edward Said, and many others. More concretely, Hannah Arendt famously declared the twentieth century to be the “century of the refugee,” a result from forced population movements caused by stricter enforcement of borders and from the mass displacement wrought by the world wars. A new modern phenomenon, ...