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This paper will try to look at some of the problems of categorisation through the prism of my own reservations and concerns when researching the novel Babyji (2005) by Abha Dawesar. The paper will examine whether categories and classifications are capable of including all the exclusions that they purport to remedy. In particular, this paper will examine the usefulness of the term ‘queer’ and the category of the nationality ‘Indian’, as well as the simultaneous problems that arise from using the category of nationality in conjunction with queerness. Moreover, it does not implicitly entail that the more categories sprout in the world, the more inclusive the world will be toward queer individuals. The paper will therefore interrogate if there is a way out at all from this conundrum of labelling and binding oneself to these categories. This interrogation is done by challenging the idea that it is easier to think of Dawesar’s novel from a monolithic perspective of nationality, while the novel’s other facets are conveniently allowed to fade by critics and researchers. To think of Babyji as more than just a nationalistic novel, the paper applies Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “foreclosure” (“The Intervention Interview” 125). Spivak, borrowing the term from Lacanian psychoanalysis, differentiates foreclosure from exclusion and conceptualises the former “to mean the interested denial of something”. By using this term, the paper thus explores other interpretations of Babyji, concluding that thinking beyond categories (despite them being a necessary evil) is quite possible.

In this article, we use data on virtually all foreclosure events between 2005 and 2009 to calculate neighborhood foreclosure rates for nearly all block groups in the United States to assess the impact of housing foreclosures on neighborhood racial/ethnic change and on broader patterns of racial residential segregation. We find that the foreclosure crisis was patterned strongly along racial lines: black, Latino, and racially integrated neighborhoods had exceptionally high foreclosure rates. Multilevel models of racial/ethnic change reveal that foreclosure concentrations were linked to declining shares of whites and expanding shares of black and Latino residents. Results further suggest that these compositional shifts were driven by both white population loss and minority growth, especially from racially mixed settings with high foreclosure rates. To explore the impact of these racially selective migration streams on patterns of residential segregation, we simulate racial segregation assuming that foreclosure rates remained at their 2005 levels throughout the crisis period. Our simulations suggest that the foreclosure crisis increased racial segregation between blacks and whites by 1.1 dissimilarity points, and between Latinos and whites by 2.2 dissimilarity points.

Using new data on real estate listings, we provide new evidence that foreclosures have a causal effect on nearby house prices and disentangle the effect into two sources: competition and disamenities. We identify the causal effect by showing that sellers respond to new REO listings in the exact week of listing, not a week before and not a week after. We disentangle competition and disamenity effects by examining the spillover effect across various stages of the foreclosure process. We find that competition effects are important in all areas, but only find evidence for disamenity effects in high density, low price neighborhoods.