Placeless People

Writings, Rights, and Refugees

Lyndsey Stonebridge

A highly topical and timely account of refugee history and literature
Draws on the work of Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, and Simone Weil
The first literary history of modern statelessness that raises vital questions about sovereignty, humanism, and the future of human rights
Highlights the importance of modern literature in understanding the challenges of today's refugee 'crisis'

Placeless People

Writings, Rights, and Refugees

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Description

In 1944 the political philosopher and refugee, Hannah Arendt wrote: 'Everywhere the word 'exile' which once had an undertone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious and unfortunate.' Today's refugee 'crisis' has its origins in the politicalDSand imaginativeDShistory of the last century. Exiles from other places have often caused trouble for ideas about sovereignty, law and nationhood. But the meanings of exile changed dramatically in the twentieth century. This book shows just how profoundly the calamity of statelessness shaped modern literature and thought. For writers such as Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka, W.H. Auden, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Simone Weil, among others, the outcasts of the twentieth century raised vital questions about sovereignty, humanism and the future of human rights. Placeless People argues that we urgently need to reconnect with the moral and political imagination of these first chroniclers of the placeless condition.

Placeless People

Writings, Rights, and Refugees

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Introduction: Placeless People: Writing, Rights and Refugees
PART ONE: READING STATELESSNESS
1. Reading Statelessness: Arendt's Kafka
2. Arendt's Message of Ill-Tidings
PART TWO: PLACELESS PEOPLE
3. Orwell's Jews
4. Weil's Uprooted
5. Beckett's Expelled
PART THREE: SANDS OF SORROW
6. Sands of Sorrow: Dorothy Thompson in Palestine
7. Statelessness and the Poetry of the Borderline: W.H. Auden and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh

Placeless People

Writings, Rights, and Refugees

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Author Information

Lyndsey Stonebridge is Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at University of Birmingham. Her books include: The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg (2011/2014), winner of the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, The Destructive Element (1998), Reading Melanie Klein (with John Phillips, 1998), The Writing of Anxiety (2007), and British Fiction after Modernism (with Marina MacKay, 2007). She is currently writing a short book on Literature and Human Rights for OUP's Literary Agendas series, and collaborating on a large interdisciplinary project, Refugee Hosts.

Placeless People

Writings, Rights, and Refugees

Lyndsey Stonebridge

Reviews and Awards

"Placeless People delves deeply into the philosophy of human rights but with easy prose and a structure that would give anyone pause when thinking about our times. The author does not preach but rather points out the different credible views in the historiography of the subject of refugees. This small book makes a fast but thought provoking read." --New York Journal of Books