Read more
Herd tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment, returning to a period, following the Second World War, when the brutal consequences of a politics of expulsion were visible. The book is a deep defence of human rights at a moment when such rights are under attack. It shows how we can resist and think beyond the politics of border and nation.
List of contents
- Introduction
- 1: The Non-Place
- 2: Writing Against Expulsion
- 3: Moving
- 4: Making
- 5: Speaking
- Conclusion
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
About the author
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 Literature & Human Rights at the University of St Andrews and co-organiser of the project Refugee Tales.
Summary
Herd tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment, returning to a period, following the Second World War, when the brutal consequences of a politics of expulsion were visible. The book is a deep defence of human rights at a moment when such rights are under attack. It shows how we can resist and think beyond the politics of border and nation.
Additional text
Writing against Expulsion in the Post-War World is a timely and politically urgent study that connects postwar experiences of forced displacement and mass migration with our contemporary moment. Herd traces an important history of the "geopolitical non-person"—a dehumanized individual whose essential rights have been suspended. Reading poetic and philosophical works by Charles Olson, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon alongside first-hand accounts, government policies, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Herd makes a powerful case for the relevance of literary analysis to real-life legal and political dilemmas. Blurring the boundaries between literary scholarship and activism, Herd delivers nothing less than a manifesto against the current political climate where detention, expulsion, and deportation have come to define the very conditions of civic life.
