Family Homes, Inverted: Illicit Occupations and Black Intimacies in and beyond the Loophole of Retreat

Abstract: This essay reads the 2019 film The Last Black Man in San Francisco through the lens of Harriet Jacobs's "loophole of retreat" to demonstrate how the film reimagines Jacobs's mode of illicit occupation of one's family home. Whereas Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl depicts her confinement in a tiny garret space for seven years after she self-emancipated in the mid-nineteenth century, the film follows two men in twenty-first-century San Francisco who become squatters in a family home that represents the main character's dispossession in a rapidly gentrifying cityscape. In considering these two texts together, this essay draws on Black feminist studies, Black feminist geography, and the legal context of squatting to two purposes: 1) to historicize and contextualize the traditions of occupation and inhabitation depicted in the film; and 2) to theorize these illicit occupations not merely as sites of fugitivity and resistance but as unique sites of black care and intimacy.