Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees
Lyndsey Stonebridge
Abstract
The twentieth century bore witness to the creation of a new class of person: the placeless people; those who cross frontiers and fall out of nation states; the refugees; the stateless; the rightless. Unlike genocide, the impact of mass displacement on modern thought and literature has yet to be recognized. For writers such as Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Simone Weil, and Dorothy Thompson, among others, the outcasts of the twentieth century raised vital questions about sovereignty, humanism, and the future of human rights. Placeless People combines an account of the ... More
The twentieth century bore witness to the creation of a new class of person: the placeless people; those who cross frontiers and fall out of nation states; the refugees; the stateless; the rightless. Unlike genocide, the impact of mass displacement on modern thought and literature has yet to be recognized. For writers such as Hannah Arendt, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Simone Weil, and Dorothy Thompson, among others, the outcasts of the twentieth century raised vital questions about sovereignty, humanism, and the future of human rights. Placeless People combines an account of these first responses to the era of the refugee with a critique of contemporary humanitarian sensibilities.
Keywords:
refugees,
twentieth-century literature,
human rights,
statelessness,
citizenship,
humanitarianism,
Hannah Arendt,
Jewish history,
Palestine
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780198797005 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: November 2018 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198797005.001.0001 |
