Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-war World: Making Space for the Human

Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-war World: Making Space for the Human addresses the current drive towards a politics of expulsion by considering a moment when the realities of expulsion were actively understood and contested. The contemporary starting point is the rapidly escalating use of detention as a response to human movement and the global production of geopolitical non-personhood in which detention and its proxies results. To understand this emerging condition the book returns to a postwar discourse in which geopolitical non-personhood was grasped as a new reality and countered across a range of disciplines and settings. Building on Lefebvre’s account of the production of space, the book argues that in the period following the war expulsion was understood as a new condition of geopolitical space. The production of such expulsive space was visible in the legacy of the concentration camps, the suspensions of Displaced Persons Camps, the exclusion zones of settler colonial regimes. Drawing on contemporary histories of forced displacement, eye witness accounts, international legal documents, and a range of emblematic cross-disciplinary texts and authors – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hannah Arendt, Charles Olson, Frantz Fanon – the argument shows how mid-century writers documented the lived experience of expulsion and asserted forms of thinking and human relation by which expulsion would be prevented. The book details the non-place of expulsion, the languages of recognition through which mid-century writers initiated a response, and the relationalities of Moving, Making and Speaking through which a space for the human can be made.