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

Writing Against Expulsion in the Postwar World: Making Space for the Human tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment. The book's 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 results. As a matter of urgency, the book argues, we need to understand what is at stake in such policies and to resist the world we are making when we detain and expel. Writing Against Expulsion returns to a postwar period when the brutal consequences of the politics of expulsion were visible and when it was clear to writers of all kinds that space for the human had to be made.

The book's focus is the period immediately following the Second World War, a moment in which the production of expulsive space was visible in the legacy of the concentration camps, in the suspensions of Displaced Persons Camps, in the exclusion zones of settler colonial regimes. Drawing on contemporary histories of forced displacement, eye witness accounts, international legal documents, and on a range of emblematic cross-disciplinary texts and authors - the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the poetry of Charles Olson, the revolutionary theory of Frantz Fanon - the book shows how mid-century writers both documented the lived experience of expulsion and asserted ways of thinking and acting by which expulsion could be prevented. What emerged were new languages of recognition - new accounts of Moving, Making and Speaking - through which the exclusions of nation and border could be countered.

David Herd, Professor of Modern Literature, University of Kent

David Herd is the author of numerous books of poetry and prose, including All Just, described by the Los Angeles Review of Books as 'one of the few truly necessary works of poetry written on either side of the Atlantic in the past decade', and Walk Song, a Book of the Year in the Australian Book Review. He has given readings and lectures in Europe, North America, India, and Australia and held visiting fellowships at George Mason University, Simon Fraser University, and the Gloucester Writers Center. He is Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Kent and co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales.