Placeless People Writings Rights and Refugees Lyndsey Stonebridge All Chapter

Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and
Refugees Lyndsey Stonebridge

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PLACELESS PEOPLE
PLACEL ESS
PEOPL E
W r i t i ng, R igh t s,
a n d R e f uge e s
LY N DSE Y STON E BR I DGE
1
3
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For the East End boys,

my dads,
Andy Carpenter and Dennis Stonebridge.
Preface and Acknowledgements
There are few memorials to the victims of forced displacement. Refugees

were—and are—the overlooked victims of modern politics. In part, this is
because the mass movement of people has been normalized over the past
one hundred years. People, usually in far away places, move; they are the
flotsam and jetsam of conflict, the unfortunate victims of history, who only
constitute a ‘crisis’ if they get too close to home. But in another sense, exist-
ential as well as political, refugees have always moved too close to what the
more securely domiciled think of as home. As Hannah Arendt argued,
although there are many reasons why one might become a refugee, once
the thread between personhood and nation is cut, it is game over for any
comfortable assumptions about civil, political, and human rights. Modern
placelessness demonstrates how fragile everybody’s place in the world is.
This book gives an account of how that vulnerability appeared to a group
of writers and thinkers who saw clearly that the ‘refugee crisis’ of the mid-
twentieth century was also a political and imaginative crisis of the most
intimate meanings of citizenship and being. It began as a sequel to an earlier
study of mid-twentieth century literature and law, The Judicial Imagination:
Writing after Nuremberg (2011). Writing that book, it became clear that along
with genocide and total war, it was the question of statelessness that pre-
occupied many writers and thinkers at mid-century. And for good reason:
no matter how bold new terms for international and historical justice were
in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the realpolitik of sovereign power meant
that the world kept on making refugees. As the writers discussed in the
pages that follow all understood, mass displacement was to be the twentieth-
century’s continuing atrocity.
In some parts of the world, including my own, it was possible to turn a
blind-eye to the steady rhythm of departures and arrivals of this ongoing
history for quite some time. Recently, that blind-eye has become a slammed
door. If more proof were needed that the threat presented by mass dis-
placement comes not from people who have no choice but to leave their
viii Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n ts
homes, but from the panicked insecurity of the rights-rich, we see it in

today’s toxic mess of bile and bureaucracy, bad faith politics, and ethno-
nationalist posturing. Now, as in the mid-twentieth century, the conse-
quences of what is in reality not a refugee crisis, but a crisis of moral and
political citizenship, are dire—for everyone.
Oddly, perhaps, this might be why this has been an unexpectedly com-
panionable book to write. Friendship, as Arendt also argued, takes on a
special poignancy in hostile environments. I have benefited hugely from the
conversation, reading, and writing of: Elizabeth Anker, Anna Barnard, Les
Back, Simon Behrman, Bryan Cheyette, Sarah Cole, Stef Craps, Samuel
Durant, Robert Eaglestone, Lara Feigel, David Feldman, Peter Gatrell, Matt
Hart, Scott Jordan Harris,Tony Kushner, Kate McLoughlin, Marina MacKay,
Itamar Mann, David Milne, Dirk Moses, Daniel Pick, Adam Piette, Denise
Riley, Jacqueline Rose, Michael Rothberg, Matthew Taunton, Benjamin
Thomas White, Daniel Trilling, Natasha Wheatley, and Marina Warner. I am
especially indebted to Allan Hepburn for his keen and generous reading,
and to Kate Jones for helping put the book together. Students on my
Refugee Writing Masters course will recognize how important their com-
mitment and cleverness were to the writing of this book.
Two groups of people have been particularly good at demonstrating the
connections between refugees and many kinds of citizenship: my colleagues
on the Refugee History project, Becky Taylor, Kate Ferguson, and Hari Reed,
and my AHRC/ESRC Refugee Hosts collaborators, Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh,
Alastair Agar, Anna Rowlands, and Aydan Geatrick. Special thanks to Yousif
M. Qasmiyeh.
Thanks to Jerome Kohn, the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust and
Yale Representation Limited for permission to reproduce Arendt’s poetry
and translations; the heirs of Bertolt Brecht and Brecht Erben for permis-
sion to quote Brecht’s poems, and Curtis Brown Ltd for permission to
quote Auden’s. Thanks too are owed to the excellent librarians from the
University of East Anglia’s Special Collections; the Manuscript Division,
Library of Congress; the John J. Burns Library, Boston College; Rauner
Special Collections Library, Dartmouth; and the Special Collections
Research Center, Syracuse University. Earlier, and now much changed, ver-
sions of chapters six and seven first appeared in Humanity and Textual Practice:
thanks to editors, Samuel Moyn, Joseph Slaughter, Peter Boxall, and
anonymous readers for the keen insights that tightened up my thinking at
crucial moments.
Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n tsix
This book would not have been written without the crucial collegial
support (wine and fish dinners) of Cathie Carmichael and Claire Jowitt.
My editor at OUP, Jacqueline Norton understood what this book was
before I could. Jenni Barclay and Sarah Churchwell have kept me running
through the past few years: they are the wittiest, kindest, smartest, and best
of friends. My place in the world, always, is with Joe, Mizzy, and Shaun.
Contents
List of Illustrations xiii
Introduction: Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees 1
PA RT ON E R E A DI NG STAT E L E SSN E SS
One: Reading Statelessness: Arendt’s Kafka 29
Two: Hannah Arendt’s Message of Ill Tidings 46
PA RT T WO PL ACE L E SS PEOPL E
Three: Orwell’s Jews 73
Four: Simone Weil’s Uprooted 96
Five: Beckett’s Expelled 119
PA RT T H R E E SA N DS OF SOR ROW
Six: Sands of Sorrow: Dorothy Thompson in Palestine 141
Seven: Statelessness and the Poetry of the Borderline:
W.H. Auden and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh 166
Endnotes 187
Bibliography 221
General Index 239
Names Index 242
List of Illustrations
1. Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in

lieu of a passport which I, a state-less person, cannot obtain at present.’
Hannah Arendt Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C., Courtesy of Hannah Arendt-Bluecher Literary Trust. 6
2. View of the Gurs transit camp, 1940–41, United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, courtesy of Jack Lewin. 47
3. Sketch of five women by Lili Andrieux, ‘Barracks Interior with
Bread and Two Bottles (Version II)’, 1940, United States Holocaust
Memorial Museum, courtesy of Lili Andrieux. 48
4. ‘Femme à Gurs’ [Woman at Gurs] by Lili Andrieux, 1940,
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy
of Lili Andrieux. 49
5. ‘But she is mad!’ Ingrid Bergman’s Irene looks down at the weeping
crowd from behind the bars of her asylum in the final scene
of Europe ’51. © BFI. 114
6. Opening scenes of Stromboli: Land of God, shot in Farfa-Sabina
refugee camp, north of Rome. © BFI. 115
7. ‘Dio Mio’/‘God, give me strength, understanding courage’.
Ingrid Bergman in final scene of Stromboli: Land of God. © BFI. 116
8. Samuel Beckett, manuscript notebook of ‘La Suite’, 1946. © The Estate
of Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett Collection, (MS.1991.001) Box 11,
Folder 9, John J. Burns Library, Boston College, reproduced by the
kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin
Limited, London. 121
9. Samuel Beckett with the Irish Red Cross at Saint-Lô, 1945.
© The Estate of Samuel Beckett, Rauner Special Collections Library,
Dartmouth College, reproduced by the kind permission of the
Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London. 125
10. Refugees retraining, from Survey Graphic, special number ‘on the
challenge to democracy’ (1939). © The British Library Board, P.P.6392.
ebm, p. 41, courtesy of The British Library Board. 149
xiv List of I llust r at ions
11. Children ‘old beyond their years’ drinking milk in Gaza.

Still from American Council for the Relief of Palestinians,
Sands of Sorrow (1950). 154
12. Hind Husseini teaching girls at Dar-el-Tifl. Still from American
Council for the Relief of Palestinians, Sands of Sorrow (1950). 156
13. Baddawi refugee camp, Northern Lebanon. © Elena
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, April 2016. 184
Introduction
Placeless People: Writing, Rights,
and Refugees
I have not felt that I entirely belong to myself any more. Something of my
natural identity has been destroyed forever with my original, real self.
I have become less outgoing than really suits me and today I—the former
cosmopolitan—keep feeling as if I had to offer special thanks for every
breath of air that I take in a foreign country, thus depriving its own people
of its benefit . . . On the day I lost my Austrian passport I discovered, at the
age of fifty-eight, that when you lose your native land you are losing
more than a patch of territory within set borders.
Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday1
Everywhere the word ‘exile’ which once had an undertone of almost

sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously suspicious
and unfortunate.
Hannah Arendt, ‘Guests from No-Man’s Land’, 30 June 19442
S tefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942) is possibly the saddest refugee
memoir of the mid-twentieth century. Jew, Austrian, European, Zweig
had been a popular novelist, playwright, biographer, and writer of intellec-
tual history. According to the statistics of Co-opération Intellectuelle, published
by the League of Nations, at one point he was the ‘most translated writer in
the world’.3 ‘It was pleasant to live here,’ he wrote of the Vienna of his youth,
‘in this atmosphere of intellectual tolerance, and unconsciously every citi-
zen of Vienna also became a supranational, cosmopolitan citizen of the
world’.4 By the time Zweig published his memoir, the ‘former cosmopol-
itan’ had become a stateless person, ‘a cruel condition . . . hard to explain to
anyone who has not known it himself. It is a nerve-racking sense of teetering
2 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s
on the brink, wide awake and staring into nothing, knowing that wherever
you find a foothold you can be thrust back into the void at any moment.’5
In February 1942, Zweig decided it was preferable to step into the void vol-
untarily, and ended his life, in a suicide pact with Elisabet Charlotte Zweig
in Brazil. The Zweigs had left England, their first country of exile, in 1940
when it became clear that like many Jewish, German, and Austrian refugees,
they might be interned as enemy aliens. ‘So,’ wrote the one-time ‘citizen of
the world’, ‘I belong to nowhere now, I am a stranger or at most a guest
everywhere.’6
Zweig’s autobiography records the moment when many of those in the
twentieth century who had thought of themselves as citizens of the world
discovered that they had become citizens of nowhere or, more precisely,
non-citizens, stateless, the placeless people.This book is about how the gen-
eration of writers and intellectuals that followed Zweig’s responded to the
emergence of this new category of person in the world: the modern refugee
whose history, as has recently become clear once more, is also the history of
the changing meanings of political and national citizenship in the later
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
At the heart of this history is the spectre of rightlessness.When the place-
less people of the mid-twentieth century were pushed out of the old ‘trinity
of state-people-territory’ they also revealed how poor a protection natural
rights had turned out to be. Others in the world had long known that as a
big idea universal rights tended to only be as good as the political power
that chose—or not—to underwrite them. But now the realities of rightless-
ness boomeranged back to Europe, unleashing an anxiety that has charac-
terized debates about national and political belonging—and refugees—ever
since. The international human rights regime that was constructed out of
the ashes of World War Two attempted to lock the spectre of rightlessness
back up in a new bottle of universal legal and normative safeguards. This
chapter in the history of rights made extraordinary gains, but because the
self-determination of peoples was also part of that same package, little could
be (or was) done to prevent new generations of people being expelled,
pushed, or driven from their homes. As it became more and more difficult
to imagine a political and legal solution to the precariousness of modern
citizenship, the more those bold new laws intended to guarantee the rights
of all people regardless of where they were in the world began to circum-
scribe the kinds of legal and political existence those stuck or moving
between nation states were entitled to. Whilst the refugees of the 1930s and
W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 3
1940s raised the spectre of rightlessness in uncompromising terms, those

who followed have tended to find themselves tumbling out of politics and
history and into, at best, an often precarious humanitarianism, at worst, a
zero degree or ‘bare-life’ existence.
In this book I return to the mid-twentieth century to recapture the scan-
dal of statelessness as it appeared to a group of writers and intellectuals who
lived its historical fall-out at first hand. Two, Hannah Arendt and Simone
Weil, were refugees themselves. It is not a coincidence that both women
were among the most direct critics of human rights in the twentieth cen-
tury. The others, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, the American journalist
and refugee advocate, Dorothy Thompson, and W.H. Auden, all understood
deracination to be a symptom of political and historical failure. None were
content with ‘horrified humanitarianism’ (the phrase is Thompson’s).
Writing and thinking before human rights came to connote the worldwide
complex of governance over suffering we assume it to be now, these writers
remind us that far from being a ‘crisis’ affecting just the poor unfortunates
of the world, the history of placelessness is everybody’s history. On the day
Stefan Zweig lost his Austrian passport, he was not the only European to
discover that when you lose your native land, you lose far more than a patch
of territory within set borders.
Placeless People
There have always been refugees, but the forced mass displacement of
people in the twentieth century was something new. Eric Hobsbawm once
suggested that ‘genocide’ and ‘statelessness’ belonged together as the two
modern extremes that were ‘so unfamiliar that new words had to be invented
for them’.7 The Nazi genocide now defines the moral, political, and imagina-
tive limit of the age of extremes; mass displacement, on the other hand,
quickly lost its status as a modern extreme—if it really ever had it. Relatively
few people are legally classified as ‘stateless’ as the term has come to be
defined under international law since the 1930s, but until very recently, as far
as most in the West were concerned, the large-scale uprooting of people from
their homes, communities, and their citizenship was accepted as the price to
be paid for a world made up of sovereign states—not least because since the
end of World War Two that price has been most heavily paid in the Middle
East and the global south.8
Hannah Arendt was one of the first to understand that what looked like
a refugee crisis in reality was a crisis for the political and moral authority of
the European nation state, particularly for its historic claim to be the home
of the rights of man. ‘Future historians will perhaps be able to note that the
sovereignty of the nation state ended in absurdity when it began to decide
who was a citizen and who was not,’ she wrote shortly after her arrival in
New York in 1941; ‘when it no longer sent individual politicians into exile,
but left hundreds of thousands of its citizens to the sovereign and arbitrary
decisions of other nations.’9 To be left to the arbitrary decisions of other
nations was to be left, precisely, nowhere: to be stateless was to be rightless.
Arendt’s arguments about the impossibility of legislating for human rights
in a world of sovereign nations have recently resurfaced in the humanities
and social sciences, and are now regularly referred to in debates about refu-
gees, sovereignty, and the future of human rights. I begin this book with
Arendt first, because of her political and historical clarity on this point, but
also because of her less remarked deep literary and cultural understanding
of placelessness. Arendt understood the new statelessness to be existential as
well as political. Its emergence required new forms of thinking and imagin-
ation. Older paradigms of cosmopolitan exile would no longer do. The
world had turned. ‘Everywhere the word “exile” which once had an under-
tone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultan-
eously suspicious and unfortunate,’ she wrote in an article entitled ‘Guests
from No-Man’s Land’ in 1944.10 The Scum of the Earth (1941) was the title
Arthur Koestler gave to his autobiographical account of his refugee experi-
ence in France.11
Arendt was not about to concede to this fall into impotent wretchedness,
either as a political thinker or as a stateless person, which was why she
strenuously rejected the pathos of Zweig’s The World of Yesterday when she
reviewed it in 1943. His yesterday never was, she argued impatiently: ‘the
world that Zweig depicts was anything but the world of yesterday; naturally,
the author of this book did not actually live in the world, only on its rim.’12
If Zweig’s autobiography is one of the saddest stories to come out of twen-
tieth-century Europe, for Arendt this was because he so fatefully mistook his
world for the world. The cosmopolitan Europe in which writers came and
went freely, dipping into one another’s languages and cultures, a world
where the Jewish writer was welcome precisely because his worldliness so
captured the spirit of the times, was only true, insofar as it was true, on the
margins. ‘It was only in art that all the Viennese felt they had equal rights,
because art, like love, was regarded as a duty incumbent on everyone,’ Zweig
concedes at one point in his memoir.13 He was correct, Arendt notes, but
Zweig missed the political and, as it turned out, existential irony of having
in effect only fictional rights. World citizenship was a sham, particularly for
the Jewish writer: ‘this remarkable nationality that its members claimed as
soon as their Jewish origin was mentioned, somewhat resembles those mod-
ern passports that grant the bearer the right of sojourn in every country
except the one that issued it.’14
Arendt was referring to the famous Nansen passports. Administered by
the League of Nations and after 1938 by the Office for the High Commission
of Refugees in London, Nansen passports conferred international legality in
place of national citizenship. Originally designed for Russians fleeing the
Revolution, as interwar conflict grew, the passports were extended to other
refugees, including Greeks,Turks, and Armenians. For German and Austrian
Jews access to the passports was minimal and haphazard.15 Arendt herself
eventually carried an Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of a Passport, issued by the
United States (Fig 1). In effect, everybody knew that only national passports
carried any value worth having. ‘The passport is the most noble part of the
human being,’ wrote Bertolt Brecht in Refugee Conversations (1940):
It also does not come into existence in such a simple fashion as a human being
does. A human being can come into the world anywhere, in the most careless
way and for no good reason, but a passport never can. When it is good, the
passport is also recognized for this quality, whereas a human being, no matter
how good, can go unrecognized.16
This was a world hell-bent on shoring up the borders of nation states with
ever more baroque systems of bureaucratic control. Passports not people
were the real bearers of rights and human dignity, a poor, dishevelled and
devalued, secondary thing. Brecht could express everything about his pre-
dicament that Zweig failed to grasp in a few pithy lines because he under-
stood this corruption of human values to be thoroughly historical and
political; as much a part of the modern nation state as ink stamps, index
cards, filing cabinets, and population statistics. Brecht, Arendt also com-
plained in her review, along with Kafka, was conspicuously absent from
Zweig’s account of interwar literary history. It was no coincidence, as
I demonstrate in the first two chapters of this book, that it was to both
Kafka and Brecht that Arendt turned in order to think through the imagina-
tive terms of the new statelessness in the 1940s.
Fig. 1. Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in lieu
of a passport which I, a state-less person, cannot obtain at present.’ Hannah Arendt
Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Courtesy of
Hannah Arendt-Bluecher Literary Trust.
Zweig was in exile from a cosmopolitanism that was both marginal and
that had failed in its universalizing mission.‘Haven’t you got that yet?’ Joseph
Roth, the first and best chronicler of the lost lives of East European Jews,
wrote to Zweig as early as the October of 1933: ‘The word [the literary
word] has died, men bark like dogs. The word has no importance any more,
none in the current state of things . . . There is no “public arena” anymore.
Everything is shit.’17 Roth’s Wandering Jews (1927 [1937]) had documented
the tragic half-lives of those who had fled to Vienna and Paris from the pog-
roms of the 1920s. Like Arendt, Roth understood that so far as the Jews of
Europe were concerned, ‘today’ was not a violent break from a reasonably
good earlier twentieth century, but the brutal culmination of the epoch’s
uncontrolled economic expansion, moribund political forms, and growing
antisemitism: ‘that yesterday is not detached from today,’ as Arendt put it in
her review.18 The ‘trellis’ behind which Zweig had felt so secure in reality
was little different ‘from the walls of prison or a ghetto’.19 When ‘the whole
structure of his life, with its aloofness from civic struggle and politics broke
down,’ Zweig was left only with the ‘disgrace’ (Arendt’s word) of finding
himself as ‘suspicious and unfortunate’ as the next Jewish refugee.
The task of imagining a political institution that could grant all groups as
groups, including Jews as Jews, the ‘right to have rights’ would pre-occupy
Arendt for the rest of her life. Zweig’s blindness was not just the error of the
well-insulated parvenu; like many others, including those staring into the
nothing of statelessness, his melancholy, exquisitely rendered as it was, missed
the true historic tragedy behind his own exile. For the Jews of Europe the
‘refugee crisis’ of the 1930s, turned out to be the first act of the Nazi geno-
cide. But statelessness was never just a tragedy of one people; nor was its
history resolved by the formation of the United Nations and the imple-
mentation of a new human rights regime at the end of World War Two. The
placeless people of the mid-twentieth century brought with them a message
about the fate of rights and citizenship in a world fast spinning off its polit-
ical and moral axes, that has echoed, for all that could hear, across the past
eighty years to the refugee ‘crises’ of our own day.‘Today all European peoples
are without rights,’ Arendt wrote in 1941: ‘That is why refugees from every
nation, driven as they are from country to country, have become the avant-
garde of their own people. The world citizens of the nineteenth century
have, quite against their will, become the world travelers of the twentieth.’20
Thrown out of their worlds, to a large extent the placeless people had no
choice but to become the avant-garde of their people: a reluctant yet, by
necessity, innovative vanguard. This, in any case, was how Arendt responded
to her own statelessness: not by conceding to wretchedness, but by thinking
experimentally and radically, turning political and historical pariahdom into
a restless and creative virtue.21 As I show in the pages that follow, she was not
the only writer and thinker to grasp that the changed meanings of exile at
mid-century demanded new forms of political thought, creative imagin-
ation, and moral courage.
Writing
The scandal of statelessness and its provocations that occupied Arendt’s
generation have been lost to much twentieth-century literary history in the
global north. On the one hand, this is not surprising: the forms of modern
literature itself, its focus on estrangement, absence, ellipses, groundlessness,
otherness, the giddy freedoms and deep despair of rootlessness, were all nur-
tured by the larger history of alienation and deracination that since the end
of the nineteenth century had troubled Europe’s self-confidence in the pro-
ject of colonial capitalism. Modernist literature, in particular, often seemed
to peel itself free of the world, claiming in its own literariness an aesthetic
liberation from the constraints of territorial sovereignty. The modernist,
notes Caren Kaplan, ‘seeks to recreate the effect of statelessness – whether
or not the writer is, in fact, in exile’.22 And whilst modern literature drew
on the experience of exile, crafting new modes of fictional being out of its
depredations, that very intimacy also cast the political history of displace-
ment into the shadows.
But we should be more surprised, and perhaps more suspicious, about the
sublimation of large-scale forced migration into the condition of literature
itself. By the late twentieth century, literary theory recognized that the trauma
of the Nazi genocide had set new terms on how literature could represent
historical experience; an appreciation of the importance of testimony and of
listening to the unspeakable followed, as did a new attention to the ways in
which the forms of modern writing responded to history’s extremes.A similar
accounting of modern statelessness (Hobsbawm’s second extreme) has proved
more elusive. Part of this has to do with the fact that whilst statelessness is
abject, the universalizing human narrative of literary cosmopolitanism has
remained, for often perfectly good reasons, alluring.
After World War Two, efforts to re-invent literary universalism meant that
versions of modernist cosmopolitanism, usually Eurocentric, kept on
running well into the Cold War and beyond. The exiled writer as a melan-
choly observer of modern life persisted as a literary and cultural type even
as any late-Romantic innocence about the insights to be gained from a life
estranged had, in reality, long gone.23 At the same moment that exile flour-
ished as a cultural and literary trope in the Cold War West, new chapters in
the history of forced migration had already opened up in India–Pakistan,
Israel–Palestine, China, Korea, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Paradoxically, the
very cultural humanism that aided the development of human rights in the
post-war West also concealed the ongoing rights scandal of the age. As new
borders created new legions of stateless people, as new battles were fought
in the name of self-determination, the terms of debate shifted away from
the inhumanity of political institutions—nation states, international treaties,
trade laws, international organizations—and towards the inhumanity of
man.The rightless (who kept on coming) receded into the mist of a human-
ism attempting to re-invent some kind of moral authority for the European
tradition even as its geopolitical power wilted (the working title for Orwell’s
Nineteen Eighty-Four was The Last Man In Europe).
It was not, of course, that post-war writers and critics did not know that
the historical terms of exile had changed. ‘[T]here is more than nationalist
mystique to the notion of the writer enraciné,’ George Steiner, himself a for
mer child refugee, wrote in his 1969 essay on Nabokov, ‘Extraterritorial’.
Like other post-war literary comparativists, including, most notably, Erich
Auerbach, Steiner was committed to disturbing remaining nativist claims
about national literatures with evidence of a longer, and implicitly far
richer, history of literary diversity and multi-lingual cross-fertilization. The
much-quoted closing lines of Steiner’s essay suggest that Nabokov’s late
modernism is the literary-historical correlative for modern refugee history:
A great writer driven from language to language by social upheaval and war is
an apt symbol for the age of the refugee. No exile is more radical, no feat of
adaptation and new life more demanding. It seems proper that those who cre-
ate art in a civilization of quasi-barbarism which has made so many homeless,
which has torn up tongues and peoples by the root, should themselves be
poets unhoused and wanderers across language. Eccentric, aloof, nostalgic,
deliberately untimely as he aspires to be and so often is, Nabokov remains,
by virtue of his extraterritoriality, profoundly of our time, and one of its
spokesmen.24
By being out of place, Nabokov is actually ‘profoundly of our time’. Steiner’s

hyperbole forces the mid-century European refugee writer back into his-
tory: ‘no exile is more radical, no feat of adaptation and new life more
demanding.’ I say hyperbole not because the experience of forced (com-
pared to voluntary) migration is not the most extreme form of exile. It is,
unequivocally. But Steiner’s powerful rhetoric here is only implicitly evi-
denced in the reading of Nabokov that precedes this final paragraph. In
Steiner’s account, Nabokov is really less the symbol of the age of the refugee
than the symbol of a new generation of cosmopolitan modernists.The ‘writer’s
art is his real passport,’ Nabokov remarked in a 1967 interview; in Lolita (1955)
he described the Nansen passport that he himself had once carried as a
‘Nonsense Passport’.25 Nabokov’s placelessness is the very thing that enables
him to ironically distance himself from the nonsense of his times. It was a ges-
ture that was to be repeated in much post-war literature. ‘London in 1950
was full of displaced people,’ V.S. Naipaul wrote, with comic self-depreca-
tion, in the introduction to The Enigma of Arrival (1987), his classic dissec-
tion of the bleak remains of empire told through the eyes of a late colonial
migrant to England: ‘but because I was looking for the more settled society
of famous English writing I paid no attention.’26
It was Edward Said who called time on the sublimation of modern state-
lessness in his bitter and beautiful 1984 essay, ‘Reflections on Exile’ (also
discussed in chapter 1). ‘Exile’ reads the first line of that essay, ‘is strangely
compelling to think about but terrible to experience.’27 In terms that dir-
ectly echo Arendt’s earlier criticism of Zweig, Said asks again—demands
again—that we pay attention to the brute history of modern displacement.
Arendt’s and Said’s is a shared refugee history.The calamity of modern state-
lessness was not solved by the creation of Israel, Arendt wrote in The Origins
of Totalitarianism (1951), which merely created another generation of refu-
gees, the 700,000 and more Palestinian refugees.28 ‘Reflections on Exile’ was
written shortly after the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps in Beirut, considered a serious breach of the Geneva
Conventions by the UN Commission set up to investigate Israel’s role in
the atrocity in 1983.29 Said begins by quoting Steiner’s conclusion, but adds
a crucial qualification:
But the difference between earlier exiles and those of our own time is, it bears
stressing, its scale: our age—with its modern warfare, imperialism, and the
quasi-theological ambitions of totalitarian rulers—is indeed the age of the
refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration.
Against this large impersonal setting, exile cannot be made to serve notions
of humanism. On the twentieth-century scale, exile is neither aesthetically
nor humanistically comprehensible: at most literature about exile objectifies
an anguish and a predicament most people rarely experience first hand;
but to think of the exile informing this literature as beneficially humanistic,
is to banalize its mutilations, the losses it inflicts on those who suffer them,
the muteness with which it responds to any attempt to understand it as
‘good for us’.30
Mass displacement is the product of modern violence and oppression:

against ‘this large impersonal setting, exile cannot be made to serve notions
of humanism’. Note how far Said is here from the more familiar argument
that by ‘humanizing’ the nameless masses of political crimes, literature might
be doing some beneficial human rights work. On the contrary, to humanize
the inhuman is to lend dignity to a condition that by robbing people of
citizenship—of the right to exist in a community—has deliberately denied
them dignity. Said’s essay refuses to patch that indignity up.
At the centre of ‘Reflections on Exile’ is Joseph Conrad’s short story,
‘Amy Foster’, first published in 1901. Amy Foster is a young country servant
who falls in and out of love with Yanko Goorall, a Polish migrant, washed
up onto the Kent coast from his sunken ship. Said describes the story as
‘perhaps the most uncompromising representation of exile ever written’.31
As Jacqueline Rose has pointed out, ‘Amy Foster’ was a consistent point of
reference for Said, not least because of Conrad’s focus on how the mind
‘might take its bearings’ in the face of a world of mass cruelty: how we
might ‘know’ this world, for Rose, is the ‘crucial conduit between Said’s lit-
erary and political concerns’.32 Conrad’s story takes us back to the begin-
nings of modern migration history, and the first mass movements of modern
times.33 At the turn of the nineteenth century, tens of thousands of real
Yanko Gooralls passed, like him, through the hands of travel agents, or ‘traf-
fickers’, through Hamburg, en route to America where, they were told, as
Yanko is in the story, the ‘U.S. Kaiser’ had given them permission to work
and prosper.This history is also the background to Kafka’s first novel-length
work, Amerika (1927). As Tara Zahra demonstrates in her compelling history
of mass migration to the United States, The Great Departure (2016), this is
the moment when what Arendt would later describe as the transition of
exile into meaning ‘something suspicious and unfortunate’ really begins.
‘Between 55 and 58 million Europeans moved to North and South America
in the period 1846–1940,’ Zahra notes.34 The habits of ‘human dumping’
(her phrase) endemic to colonialism, spread across to the West.The question

of what rights could possibly mean in a world where the global movement
of labour and people buffeted against the bureaucracies of increasingly
defensive nation states also began with stories told by Conrad and others of
the ‘dread of an inexplicable strangeness’ that gripped both migrants and
their hosts.35
‘Amy Foster’ marks the moment when romantic ideas about exile began
to falter, but the story is also about a new state of mind—a weird, haunting
impenetrability that clings to the stranger as he arrives, uninvited, and
unknown. Conrad is indeed ‘uncompromising’ in his depiction of Yanko’s
unbearable wretchedness, the hostility with which he is greeted, his other-
ness, and his dismal death in a puddle in the yard of a Kentish worker’s cot-
tage. But what Said finds particularly uncompromising is how the tragedy
of the effort to communicate from within his aching loneliness and isola-
tion is played out formally in Conrad’s highly stylized, over-communicative,
prose: ‘Conrad took this neurotic exile’s fear and created an aesthetic prin-
ciple out of it . . . Each Conradian exile fears, and is condemned endlessly to
imagine, the spectacle of a solitary death illuminated, so to speak, by unre-
sponsive, uncommunicating eyes.’36 Something of this fear is also in the
singularity of Said’s own prose: ‘[b]ecause nothing is secure. Exile is a jealous
state,’ he writes, connecting the Conradian exile’s fears with those of the
Palestinian refugee in the 1980s.37 Is this brutal and uncompromising place-
lessness the same as the exile that has ‘taken its place as a topos or human
experience alongside the literature of adventure, education, and discovery?’
Said asks. ‘Is this the same exile that literally kills Yanko Goorall, and has bred
the expensive, often dehumanizing relationship between twentieth-century
exile and nationalism?’38 My answer in this book is no, it is not the same: the
dehumanizing history of placelessness took, and takes, other forms.
Like Arendt’s writing of the 1940s, ‘Reflections on Exile’ is a key text in
the literary history of modern statelessness because of Said’s refusal to con-
cede the political experience of mass displacement to literary humanism.
That refusal also distinguishes the work of the triptych of writers discussed
in the middle of this book: George Orwell, Simone Weil, and Samuel
Beckett. All three wrote about rootlessness whilst pressed up tight against
the mass upheavals of Europe in the 1940s. All three, although in tellingly
different ways, refused to concede the historical experience of displacement
to narratives of humanity. ‘Humanity’, Beckett wrote in 1946, ‘is about as
welcome as a ‘dum-dum bullet’: ‘There must be pestilence, Lisbon and
religious butchery, for people to think of loving one another, to fuck the
peace with the gardener next door, to put it plainly.’39 Beckett’s impatience,
like Arendt’s, was born of a political and moral recognition that the dis-
courses of humanity and human rights were a poor response to the radical
rightlessness of the age.
Again, ‘Amy Foster’ is prescient here. As much as the story is about the
agony of Yanko’s exile, it is also about the cruel compassion of modern
humanitarian sentiment. The subject of the story, after all, is not Yanko, but
Amy Foster, the simple and rather dull girl who alone reaches out to him.
‘I wonder whether he saw how plain she was,’ narrates Doctor Kennedy, ‘or
perhaps he was seduced by the divine quality of her pity.’40 Amy ‘fosters’
Yanko. But as she is as alone as he his, and as there is no context for her care
other than her own mildly desirous attraction to his suffering, hers is a
weightless and failed fostering. In the end, Amy kills him—passively, of
course, as divine pity can only kill its objects. The first winter after their
child is born Yanko falls ill; vulnerable, helpless, needy, he becomes stranger
still. ‘And she sat with the table between her and the couch, watching every
movement and every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that
man she could not understand creeping over her.’41 She leaves him to die.
Amy’s compassion is ultimately as uncommunicative as the hostility of the
other villagers.
Later, Arendt would diagnose the caprice of humanitarian imagination as
structural to the historical and political circumstance of the modern refugee.
To be placeless is to be denied political sovereignty, it is thus to also become
strange to those for whom national citizenship is a given, albeit a given that
became increasingly uncertain as nationalism and totalitarianism took hold:
‘Since they [Jewish refugees] obviously do not belong to any other people,
they create an uncanny impression in their complete dependence upon the
compassion of others, in their naked mere-humanity, of something utterly
inhuman’ she wrote in ‘Guests from No-Man’s Land’.42 Mere humanity is
the last thing that will guarantee a person rights and recognition; on the
contrary being simply human, a person without a place, is the first step to
becoming inhuman. The ‘inexplicable strangeness’ that is at the heart of
Conrad’s 1901 short story, the ‘uncanny impression’ that the placeless person
brings with her in Arendt’s writing, are both about the anxieties of national
sovereignty in an age of mass movement. There is an important moral and
political lesson here that was appreciated by the writers in this book:
that compassion, empathy, and pity do not stand outside the story of the
modern refugee, but are fundamentally intrinsic to its unfolding—and

ongoing—tragedy.
The ‘ethical turn’ in literary studies has placed a lot of emphasis on
‘responsibility’ and ‘obligation’ in recent years. All the writers in this book
understand rightlessness to be an ethical question, but, just as importantly,
indeed for most of them more importantly, each also insists that ethics
traffics with politics.That trafficking is often a matter of literary or aesthetic
form—of imagining statelessness and, importantly, the alternatives to
nationalist conceptions of political sovereignty. As such, the ‘rights’ in the
title of this book are also to be understood—as rights always have been
understood—as occupying a position between moral imagination and pol-
itics, and between ethics and history. As Derek Attridge argues elegantly in
The Singularity of Literature (2004), there is no necessary correlation between
the ethical work sometimes done by literature and the moral and political
judgments we may derive from our reading.43 But, in turn, these writers
remind us that there are moments in history that call for something more
robust than an ethics of response and encounter; moments when the infinite
demands of justice, Jacques Derrida’s ‘incalculable justice’, must be made
accountable within political and historical terms. Part of my argument in
this book is that for literary ethics to amount to something more than liter-
ary humanitarianism, it too must reckon with political and moral judg-
ment.44 Attridge argues that literature is often singular because its very
strangeness draws us into an encounter with otherness: the ethics of the
literary encounter exists beyond our sense of self-sovereignty, and to one
side of political agency. But—and this question is as pressing today as it was
in the mid-twentieth century—in a world of defensive nation states, uncon-
trolled ethno-nationalism, and barbaric bureaucracy—where can that ethics
possibly land? As Zweig discovered when the paper of his passport to
cosmopolitanism turned to dust, nowhere is the weightlessness of an ethics
of non-sovereignty more apparent than within the politics of historical
statelessness.
Rights
When Arendt used the word ‘stateless’ she was describing a diverse group of
people—refugees, political exiles, temporarily denaturalized citizens, those,
like many Jews, who had been stripped of their citizenship altogether,
thers, like Arendt herself, who were illegal immigrants. Out of place, these
o
people were also out of law, and out of political and historical time. In Ayten
Gündogdu’s words: ‘The stateless were rightless in the sense that they were
deprived of legal personhood as well as the right to action and speech.’45 In
the first two thirds of this book, I tend to follow Arendt’s generalization,
although legal and diplomatic fussing over the different kinds of status that
should be accorded to different types of placeless people was already a con-
spicuous feature of the debates within the international community that
would come to frame mid-century human rights.
In the interwar period, it was assumed that refugees were ‘persons who
had lost the diplomatic protection of their home governments without
acquiring another nationality’.46 Stateless people, on the other hand, were
understood to have no nationality de jure although, in reality many refugees
were de facto stateless. Whilst some, including two pioneers of mid-century
refugee studies, John Hope Simpson and R.Yewdall Jennings (both of whom
Arendt drew on in her own scholarship), insisted on maintaining the dis-
tinction, by the late 1930s others could already see that it mattered little how
one came to be ejected from legal and political representation, rightlessness
was rightlessness.47 At first blush, the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human
Rights (UDHR), looked like it might offer a way through this problem with
the promise of universal human rights. Yet, as the drafters well understood,
the key to protecting rights was never actually going to be universal human
rights for all—that grander ambition came later.48 Rights had been ravaged
in Europe and elsewhere because the forces of ethno-nationalism, following
the practices of colonialism, had taken over the juridical and political func-
tions of the state, and had started administering mass murder and population
expulsions, as well as taxes and civic rights. Buttressing the freedoms neces-
sary to keep the state safe was thought to be the best protection against
tyranny. Unlike Arendt, Weil, or Orwell, post-war liberal thinkers, in histor-
ian G. Daniel Cohen’s words: ‘optimistically viewed citizenship, safeguarded
in time of crisis by international organization, as the natural guardian of
human rights.’49
Others, including the two giants of mid-century human rights, René
Cassin and Hersch Lauterpacht, pushed back hard, understanding clearly
that it would not take much for the politics of territorial sovereignty to go
to the bad once more. Both argued strenuously for the right of asylum to
be included in human rights law. In 1948, the year of the UDHR’s publica-
tion, Lauterpacht publicly lamented that the failure to grant asylum had
prevented it from comprehensively succeeding in its historical mission to

secure, as he later put it, the transformation of the individual from ‘an object
of international compassion into a subject of international right’.50
The local cause of that failure embodied the contradictions inherent in
attempting to legislate for the rights of all whilst also attempting to re-assert
the norms of territorial sovereignty. In an episode often told in human
rights histories, on 20 October 1948 the 3rd Committee of the UDHR
broke off its deliberations to listen to Ralph Bunche’s report on the refugee
crisis in Palestine. Bunche, later awarded the Nobel Peace prize (the first
African-American to win the prize) had taken over as UN mediator after the
assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte in September. He would leave
the post only six months later. For anybody attending the 108th meeting
of the UDHR Committee still feeling optimistic about the future of human
rights, Bunche’s account was a bitter dose of reality testing. The delegate
from Iraq remarked that the ‘committee would do better to take up this
concrete case of human rights violations than to spend hours debating
rights in the abstract’.51
To an extent the committee did just that, but the effects of those deliber-
ations were to prove equivocal for refugee history. On the one hand,
Lebanon, host to the largest number of Palestinian refugees, seized the
moment to argue for the right of refugees to return to their home countries
(now Article 13.2 of the UDHR). On the other hand, where earlier drafts
had granted the right to ‘seek and be granted’ asylum, Saudi Arabia and the
United Kingdom led the charge for an implicit and, as it turned out, disin-
genuous, strengthening of national immigration laws. Article 14 was watered
down to the ‘right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from
persecution’, an ‘ambiguous play of words’, as Lauterpacht pointed out
crossly, that effectively made a nonsense out of the right it seemed to prom-
ise: really you don’t need a right to ask for asylum, you simply ask for it;
equally, if the ‘right to enjoy’ really meant, as Mrs Corbett from the United
Kingdom argued when she introduced the amendment, the ‘right of every
state to offer refuge and to resist all demands for extradition’, why not sim-
ply say this, particularly given that international law already provided against
states having to grant extradition in cases of persecution?52
Some of the weaknesses of the UDHR were redressed by the 1951
Convention on Refugees, which set the terms for refugee law for years to
follow. Even here, however, as legal historians have argued increasingly for-
cibly over the last ten years, as those terms have battled against a new tide of
nationalism, the granting of refugee rights was in effect a lockdown that, at

its best, pushed placeless people into inhabiting specific and sometimes
limiting political and juridical categories, and at worse, threw them out of
those categories altogether.53 Elfan Rees, a Welsh theologian involved with
the Palestinian refugee aid effort described early drafts of the Convention as
being like ‘a menu at an expensive restaurant, with every course crossed out
except the soup – and a footnote to the effect that the soup might not be
served in certain circumstances’.54 Indeed, as it turned out, for the Palestinians
soup too was off the menu, as they were under the care of the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNWRA) and so exempt.55
The 1951 definition of a refugee put careful historical markers around the
type of placeless person assumed by the Convention. Although the 1967
Protocol removed the original temporal and geographical restrictions, the
existential and affective connotations, as well as the legal terms, of being a
modern refugee have persisted. According to the Convention, a refugee is a
person who:
owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,

nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is
outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear,
is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who,
not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former
habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such
fear, is unwilling to return to it.56
This is a capacious definition in legal and political terms, but it comes with
cultural and historical baggage. As much as it looked forward to future
brutal oppressions, the Convention’s focus on ‘persecution’ spoke directly to
recent European refugee history and to the Cold War; similarly, the emphasis
on ‘fear’ captured the terror of totalitarian persecution but not the agoniz-
ing anxiety of having nowhere to go, or of statelessness without term.
Legal history and literary history eventually ended up telling a very simi-
lar story about exile and statelessness in the post-war period: the exile, usu-
ally European, emerges as an individual of conscience and agency, a victim
of persecution who, nonetheless, is of his time; and the exile’s others, some-
times but usually not European, caught in the dehumanizing movements of
mass displacement whose existence is recognized neither by the humanism
of human rights nor (to recall Said) by literary history. Over the past thirty
years, this distinction has become blurred. As the West is again waking up to
the consequences of mass displacement, Lauterpacht’s dream of all being

subject to international law has spun further out of reach for the millions who
find themselves, once more, objects of international compassion—where
compassion now also means being subject to mass systems of humanitarian,
frequently militarized, administration within an increasingly volatile local and
global politics. Soup is still off the menu for all but the lucky minority.
The move away from a politics of rights, such as it was, to a least harm
humanitarianism has revealed again how vulnerable placeless people always
were even when international law was trying its best. Citizenship, as Arendt
and others understood, was the glue that stuck rights to ‘Man’ as an abstract
category. Once you have lost your citizenship, nothing is granted and every-
thing is to be proved—including, in a further cruel twist, how it was you got
to lose your citizenship in the first place. For the refugee, the route to
becoming a subject of international law has always been the pilgrimage of
the supplicant. As early as the 1938 Convention Concerning the Status of
Refugees Coming from Germany, refugees had to ‘prove’ that they no longer
had protection of the German government and were not leaving Germany
for reasons of ‘purely personal convenience’.57 The 1951 Convention refu-
gee had to demonstrate that her fear of persecution was ‘well-founded’.
Today, many refugees also have to demonstrate not only their persecution
but their fear too—suffering has to be seen to be believed.
For today’s refugee the process of gaining political and juridical recogni-
tion is essentially testimonial, as indeed, is the case for many victims of
human atrocity struggling to find historical, legal, and political recognition.
This would be fine were the law infallibly benign. As the ‘certificates of
trauma’ required by the French state to authenticate asylum claims show,
however, it is no longer (if it ever were) a simple matter to disentangle the
moral and affective force of trauma from institutions of legal and political
power. Far from expanding political understandings of what it means to be
a victim of historical violence—as did the groundbreaking testimonies of
Holocaust survivors in the trial of Adolf Eichmann—for millions today, the
requirement to demonstrate one’s trauma is a further obstacle to regaining
legal and political status. Didier Fassin has described the French certificates
of trauma as symptoms of contemporary ‘humanitarian reason’; a reasoning
that is strong on foregrounding human suffering but weak on the political
and historical causes of that suffering.58 In this context, it is difficult to keep
on arguing that an ethics based on response to trauma and suffering alone
is sufficient. It never was.
Refugees
For all the writers in this book, refugees were never simply refugees. This
was not just a case of seeing the human person behind the refugee category.
Refugees were not simply refugees because they opened up a space—at
once historical, political, and imaginative—for thinking and being between
nation states. We have become accustomed to assuming that this is a place
of pathos. The literary archive of modern statelessness is much more than
this. For writers and journalists, political theorists and human rights advo-
cates, philosophers and poets living through the mid-century—and most of
the authors in this book were many of these things at once—writing about
displacement was a powerful way of thinking about rights, citizenship, and
sovereignty at the moment when the question of what it meant to belong
to a nation, at least in Europe, was at its most vexed.
The question they all raise is as urgent now as it was, although very dif-
ferently, in the mid-twentieth century: what kind of political, legal, moral,
and psychic life might we imagine existing between national citizenship and
statelessness? Until lately, that question has been muted in literary history
and theory. Ten years after Said’s ‘Reflections on Exile’, Richard Rorty’s
influential call for the rights-rich to develop a new discourse of moral sen-
timents in the post-Cold War 1990s blew one last liberal wind into the sails
of modernist cosmopolitanism. Nabokov, for Rorty, was of his time not
because of his extraterritoriality, but because his ‘private irony’ re-described
human cruelty, delivering a valuable ‘lesson in style’ (Nabokov’s own words)
for liberals abashed at inequality but no longer persuaded by big theories of
political change.59 Solidarity with the rightless was still an aim, but it was a
chastened, and so necessarily ironic, kind of political identification that Rorty
urged, and one that did little to challenge the terms of Western sovereignty.
At the opposite extreme, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s engage-
ment with the question of the refugee and modern biopolitics has led
others to conclude that there is little point carrying on ‘infinite negoti-
ations’ with discourses of rights and citizenship, that we might even dispense
with political sovereignty altogether, and hedge our bets on post-humanism
instead.60 Agamben cut his critical teeth on the work of Arendt and Simone
Weil, as well as Kafka, and his thinking about the extent to which forms of
law have become forms of life is a presence throughout this book.
Nonetheless, with the notable exception of Weil, few writers at the time
were quite as fatalistic about the prospects for political sovereignty. For
Agamben, because sovereign power has always violently operated a divide
between bios (politically qualified life) and zoē (natural life), when the
mid-century refugee was ejected from categories of political and juridical
personhood she was always going to find herself on the perilous border
‘between nature, law and violence, as homines sacri, or sacred men who can
be killed with impunity’.61 As others have argued, however, there is nothing
inevitable about the fall into bare life for the refugee in Arendt’s account of
rightlessness.62 The European roots laid for universal rights in 1789 may
have withered by 1943—the date Arendt published her now famous essay
‘We Refugees’—but it did not necessarily follow that that was the end of
the idea of a politics based on the exchange of rights and power. ‘We are not
born equal; we become equal as members of a group on the strength of our
decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights,’ Arendt wrote in The
Origins of Totalitarianism.63
Thinking about how we might ‘become equal members of a group’ from
the starting point of historical groundlessness, for Arendt, and indeed for
others, included a bold, and often normative, role for the literary-historical
imagination. For the thinkers in this book, writing was a means of excavat-
ing the mind in transit between different modes of political and historical
belonging, as well as exploring the suffering of powerlessness. Before liter-
ary humanism could reassert its authority in the post-war period, before
modernist melancholy became the style for the mutilations of exile (Said
evokes Adorno in the closing pages of ‘Reflections on Exile’), and before the
literary humanitarianism of the empathetic reader of our own age, for those
who followed Europe’s refugee rat runs (Arendt, Weil, Beckett), lived in
refugee communities (Arendt,Weil, Beckett, Auden), lived in camps (Arendt
and Weil), advocated for refugees (Arendt,Weil, Auden,Thompson), worked
for the Red Cross (Beckett), and who watched the catastrophe of Jewish
statelessness turn into the catastrophe of Palestinian statelessness with dis-
may (all of the above), the task was to forge a style c apable of responding to
the new rightlessness.
For Arendt, historical imagination was foremost a matter of ‘adequacy
and response’: the writer must find a style that is adequate to her subject, a
response true to the history she is telling.64 When she wrote her master-
piece, The Origins of Totalitarianism, she defended her method by explaining
that she was writing about something she wished not to preserve, but to
destroy. Hence the importance of avoiding the language and structure of

historical inevitability, or philosophical fatalism, and of crafting instead a
response that could register the singularity of new political phenomena.
Kant’s Einbildungskraft—the building of images by which to understand the
world—are crucial to this method. Exercises of imagination, for Arendt, cre-
ate the kind of thinking necessary to judge the world. In her writing about
statelessness, again image-building is central to her method. So too are fic-
tion and poetry. As a historian, Arendt produces an account of the modern
refugee as a symptom of a larger crisis about the meanings of citizenship and
sovereignty at mid-century. As a reader of literature, she looks to writing
both for critique and in order to imagine blueprints for a different politics
of belonging. This is what she finds in the failed story of the European
Bildunsgroman. The modern novel was a means by which Europeans could
imagine themselves into both national and cosmopolitan modes of citizen-
ship. As that dream broke, as Arendt shows through her readings of Rahel
Varnhagen and Franz Kafka, other forms of imagining begin to emerge.
Arendt’s famous call for a new politics of a ‘right to have rights’, I argue in
the first section of this book, was also forged, in part, out of her intense
engagement with literary, as well as political, modes of thinking in the 1940s.
She was not alone, although most exercises in imagining the future in the
1930s and 1940s were grimly dystopic rather than, as in Arendt’s case, cau-
tiously messianic. In 1933, H.G. Wells, author of one of the first twentieth-
century declarations of the rights of man, prophesized a world where the
problem of statelessness had been eradicated by the emergence of a world-
wide state, in his huge, and slightly tedious, The Shape of Things to Come
(1933). Orwell charged that Wells’ insulated late nineteenth-century middle-
class sensibility ultimately meant that he was ‘too sane’ to understand what
was really going on at mid-century. Perceptiveness about the reality of fas-
cism and totalitarianism belonged rather to those who suffered directly
under them, he argued, refugees, such as Orwell’s close friend, Koestler,
‘nearly all of them . . . who have seen totalitarianism at close quarters and
known the meaning of exile and persecution.’65 Orwell, who opens the
middle section of this book, knew that he was probably also ‘too sane’ to
know the meaning of exile.Yet in Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel best known
for its indictment of the totalitarian mind, it is the image of a boat of Jewish
refugees being sunk in the Mediterranean that expresses the possibility of a
politics dependent neither on pity nor nationalism. Implacably anti-nationalist
and anti-colonialist, and often casually antisemitic, in this most literary of his
fictions, Orwell also dares to imagine another possible history for mid-
century statelessness.
Arendt later taught Orwell’s texts on her courses on twentieth-century
political experience at Berkeley, the New School, and Cornell.With Simone
Weil, both Orwell and Arendt understood there to be an intimate connection
between the rise of totalitarianism and not just war-forced migration but the
large-scale deracination caused by colonialism and reckless economic expan-
sion. ‘Whoever is uprooted himself uproots others,’Weil warned General de
Gaulle shortly before her death in England in 1943.66 If Orwell was too sane
to encounter the limits of exile, many have accused Weil of being too mad to
be a reliable political moralist.Yet not only has her understanding of rootless-
ness proved enduring,Weil also produced one of the most striking critiques of
mid-century human rights that we have. As much as the old Rights of Man,
the new rights advocated by the doctrine of personalism were there to be
fought for, contracted, defended; as such, she argued, they served the same
forces of expansion and domination that had torn so many from their
roots. Weil died before the UDHR drafters had begun their work, but she
would not have been at all surprised at the document’s failure to reconcile
its moral aims with the realpolitik of late and postcolonial state formation.
‘Humanity does not exist in the anonymous flesh lying inert by the
road-side,’ Weil wrote in one of her final denunciations of the misplaced
abstractions of mid-century humanism.67 In 1946, Samuel Beckett replied that
the road-sides trod by the nameless and placeless were exactly where
humanity now lay, but that one did not, like Weil, need an ethics of the
supernatural in order to see it. Beckett’s writing has long been praised for its
unique abstraction of human suffering. In his later works, such as Comment
C’est (1961), Catastrophe (1982), and Rough Radio II (1961) human cruelty and
torture are explicitly framed within the human rights politics of later twen-
tieth-century Europe: Algeria, totalitarian repression, the censorship of
writers are all explicit references. But Beckett’s engagement with what he
described in 1946 as ‘the time-honoured conception of humanity in ruins’
began much earlier.68 What Beckett had discovered with his work with the
Irish Red Cross in Saint-Lô, Normandy, was the same fissure identified by
Arendt between those who had nothing and those who had something to
give, between the rights-rich and the rights-poor.The characters who wan-
der through the three short stories that he first wrote in French, ‘La Fin’,
(between 1945–6) ‘L’Expulsé’ (October 1946), and ‘Le Calmant’ (December

1946) are both subject to a regime of humanitarian indifference (‘They
clothed me and gave me money’ read the first lines of ‘La Fin’) and restless
agents, stumbling in a stripped down French, groping for a new narrative.
These are the new clowns of the dark background of difference, ironists of
their own suffering, chroniclers of the gap that had opened up between the
placeless people and the rest of the world. Conrad’s Yanko Goorall finds his
voice in the intimate chatter of Beckett’s narrators: ‘You become unsociable,
it’s inevitable. It’s enough to make you wonder sometimes if you are on the
right planet.’69 Beckett, I argue in chapter 5, sets up the terms for a justly
uncomfortable engagement with the aesthetics of the very humanitarianism
that became necessary as the world struggled not only to legislate for, but to
conceptualize the new rightlessness.
Nowhere more enduringly did the mid-century struggle to legislate for
human rights crash into the politics of self-determination than in Israel/
Palestine to which I turn in the final section. One of the first to advocate for
the rights of Jewish refugees in the late 1930s, journalist and writer, Dorothy
Thompson scandalized U.S. opinion when she similarly campaigned for
Palestinian refugees in the late 1940s and 1950s.With Arendt,Thompson was
one of the first to grasp that the refugee crises of the 1930s was the symptom,
not the cause, of a nationalism that was ‘turning the world into a jungle.’
Refugees, she wrote in 1938, were ‘merely people forced to run away from
one part of the jungle to another part of it. Their personal tragedy can only
serve one great social purpose. They are and should be recognized as an
advancing crowd shouting a great warning:The jungle is growing up, and the
jungle is on fire.’70 There would be no solution to the refugee problem she
pointed out presciently just a year later,‘so long as the world was divided into
sovereign states’.71 Horrified humanitarianism would never be enough.
Thompson is important to the modern history of statelessness because she
insisted on seeing symmetries between the refugee histories of the Jews and
Palestinians that very few were willing to concede at mid-century. She drove
a moral and historical truck through the new human rights pieties—and lost
friends, work, and public confidence as a result.
Thompson’s story is also important—and a harbinger for what was to
follow—because in the end she could not think beyond the same terms of
political sovereignty that she identified as structural to modern statelessness.
The European nation state failed, she argued, the moment when national
identity became the organizing principle of state formation. As the United

States, by contrast, was formed of citizens not peoples, its democracy was
more robust (Arendt, to an extent, thought so too). What Thompson could
not and would not see was that the terms of that citizenship could be as
easily racialized: one of her less persuasive arguments against Israel was that
its very existence questioned the ‘loyalty’ of American Jews. The refugees of
the mid-century might have upset much that had been assumed about
rights and the nation state—except for the fantasy that some states are more
immune from the politics of exclusionary racism than others.
For one brief moment in the mid-twentieth century Palestine/Israel
raised the question of what a rights-based citizenship without nationalism
might actually look like—for Arendt, this was precisely the wager that was
raised by the new statelessness. To a large extent, that question was closed
down by the exigencies of the Cold War, late and postcolonial conflict. As
many were quick to grasp, rights-based universal humanism, however well
intentioned, was not going to prevent others from stumbling into voids of
statelessness similar to those which swallowed up Stefan Zweig and his
wife in 1942.
Placeless People concludes with a study of two poets from different ends of
the same history of exile and displacement: Auden, whose voluntary 1939
departure from England coincided with the first convulsion of national
frontiers in Europe, its colonies, protectorates and mandates, and the Oxford-
based Palestinian,Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, whose writing captures the reality of
today’s borderline living with an original clarity. Auden loops us back to
Arendt, not just because the two became close friends in New York, but
because his writing, like hers, is a thought experiment in imagining differ-
ent forms of human and political belonging. But the last word of the book
goes to Qasmiyeh whose remarkable 2008 poem, ‘Holes’, brilliantly refuses
to authenticate his own suffering for the benefit of others. Arendt would
have recognized in this rejection of the terms of literary humanitarianism a
powerful claim, not for the cast-off entitlements of others, but for the ‘right
to have rights’.
* * *
Placeless People opens in 1933 on the border between Germany and
Czechoslovakia, as Hannah Arendt enters a safe house and slips into state-
lessness. It ends in Baddawi refugee camp on the northern border of
Lebanon, established in 1955 and home today for not only second and now
third generation Palestinian refugees, but Syrians, Kurds, and Iraqis too.
I offer only a limited historical snapshot of the modern literary history of
statelessness that is, by definition, massive, and which contains within its
largely untouched archive the early history of our current moral and polit-
ical failures. Missing from these pages are the stories and texts of the Germans
forced on the march in the wake of World War Two, or the 15 million or so
who later crossed out of the Soviet region; the Chinese pushed between the
Revolution and Japanese occupation; the Indians who found themselves in
Pakistan, and the Muslims in India, who all experienced the violence of
state formation at bloody first hand; the Algerians pushed into camps by the
French—sometimes the same camps that Arendt and her colleagues had
been put in; the Yugoslavians, both those reluctantly pushed back into Tito’s
domain (often to their deaths) and those fleeing a new chapter of European
ethno-nationalism in the 1990s; the Hungarians of 1956; the Vietnamese; the
Ugandan Asians—and these are just some of the forced migrations of the
twentieth century alone. We need to read, listen, and compare these refugee
writers today not only to acknowledge statelessness for the modern trauma
that it was and is, but also to learn from what this archive reveals about the
prospects for different kinds of political citizenship that might still exist.
At the beginning of the modern age of human rights the best writing did
not simply describe a new reality—the reality of the wretchedness of the
refugee or the pathos of the permanent exile—but registered that a world
which has accepted that simply by dropping into the gaps between nation
states people could become political and juridical non-persons has already
torn the fabric of reality in an outrageous way. As Carol Batchelor from the
United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) put it in a
review of the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons: ‘Proving
statelessness is like establishing a negative. The individual must demonstrate
something that is not there.’72 Placeless People concludes that we need now to
reconnect with a moral imagination bold enough to demonstrate that the
people who are not here are, in fact, everywhere.
PART
ONE
Reading Statelessness
one
Reading Statelessness
Arendt’s Kafka
B efore the house on the border, stand a woman and her mother. ‘Come
in, come in,’ whispers the landlady at the threshold. Through the door,
the woman and her mother can see a table laid for supper, and beyond that
another door, just ajar, open to the dark.They enter and share the meal with
the landlady and her family. After they have eaten, she beckons the two
women towards the second door, at the back of the house. ‘Here, now you
go,’ she hisses. They cross the second threshold and are bemused to find
themselves standing outside the law.
The story of how Hannah Arendt and her mother, Marthe, fled across the
Germany–Czech border in the spring of 1933 is Kafkaesque in even more
senses than it might first appear. Arrested while researching antisemitic
‘horror propaganda’ at the Prussian State Library for Kurt Blumenfeld and
the German Zionist Organization, Arendt had escaped by persuading her
unusually kind interrogator of her innocence. Arriving at the border, the
women were aided by a friendly family whose house had a front door in
Germany and a backdoor into Czechoslovakia. They entered as guests, and
departed stateless.1 Arendt would later remark that Kafka’s world became
‘rather uncannily adequate to the reality’ which became lived experience
for millions in the 1940s.2 In her own case, that experience was to cut deep
into her clear-sighted analysis of how the then new category of statelessness
put an end to one dream of universal rights at mid-century.
This has all been well told recently, and today Arendt’s writing on rights,
refugees, and statelessness are an authoritative and well-established part of
the human rights canon.3 Less commented upon is the fact that her cri-
tique of rights was forged, at least in part, from her reading of fiction and,
in particular, from the work she did on Kafka in the mid 1940s; in other
words, at precisely the same moment she was working on the essays that
would eventually form the basis of her now famous the ‘Decline of the
Nation State, and the End of the Rights of Man’ chapter in Origins of
Totalitarianism. In that chapter, Arendt argued that the rights of men had
ended the moment when the European nation state succumbed to nation-
alism. People had rights only so long as nations recognized them as citizens;
rights, unlike refugees, did not travel.
Arendt is one of Kafka’s most audacious ‘creative readers’.4 Newly arrived
in New York, writing furiously and copiously, about refugees, Jewish pol-
itics, the future of Europe and Palestine, she used Kafka as a ‘thought
experiment’ to think about both the rightlessness she was experiencing
and analyzing, and its negative, a different kind of political and ethical
community, a possible future. Until very recently Arendt’s reading of Kafka
was a missing chapter in post-war literary histories of trauma and exile, late
modernism, and critical theory. In what follows, I suggest that her 1940s
essays on Kafka offer important insights for grasping how the history of
the novel form is connected to shifting (and shifty) definitions of legal and
political sovereignty in the mid-century and beyond.
The banality of exile

Narratives of exile, of flight and cunning, quest and return, run through
literary modernism, but the stories of modern refugees that emerged in the
mid-twentieth century brought something new with them. ‘Everywhere,’
Arendt wrote in a 1944 article, ‘the word “exile”, which once had an under-
tone of almost sacred awe, now provokes the idea of something simultaneously
suspicious and unfortunate.’ The article was called ‘Guests from No-Man’s
Land’.5 Because the new refugees were treated as national limit cases, they
threatened ideas about citizenship; because the world of nations could not
normalize the conditions of the stateless without jeopardizing their own
definitions of sovereignty, they remained in limbo. Placeless, the new strangers
carried with them the threat of legal and political freefall; objects of pity and
contempt, they brought with them a uniquely wretched message about
the fragility of rights in an age of nationalism. The shift from a concept of
inalienable rights to the ambivalent humanitarianism that has been so
conspicuous in modern times began with the transformation of exiles into
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Another patient aged twenty-seven had whooping cough, which
lasted six weeks, and was followed by severe pain in the back. For
this she consulted various physicians, being treated for Pott's
disease and spinal irritation. She, however, continued to grow worse,
and every jar and twist gave severe pain. At this time she had lost
much flesh, had pain in her back and elsewhere, and was subject to
numerous and violent spasms. When first seen by the physician who
consulted me she was complaining of pains in her legs, hips, and left
shoulder, which she considered rheumatic, and with pain in the
abdomen. Examination of the back with the patient on her side
showed a slight prominence over the position of the first or second
lumbar vertebra. The spot was painful on pressure, and had been so
ever since the attack of whooping cough three years before. A tap on
the sole of either foot made her complain of severe pain in the back.
The same result followed pressure on the head. The patient was
unable to stand or walk, but occasionally sat up for a short time,
although suffering all the time. There was no muscular rigidity. The
limbs and body were quite thin, but, so far as could be detected, she
had no loss of motor or sensory power. At times, when the pains
were worse, the arms would be flexed involuntarily, and she stated
that once the spine was drawn back and a little sideways. The pain
in the hips was augmented by pressure. During the application of a
plaster bandage she had a sort of fit and fainted, and the application
was suspended. She soon recovered consciousness, but refused to
allow the completion of the dressing. I diagnosticated the affection as
largely hysterical, and a few months later received word that the
patient was on her feet and well.
Kemper109 relates the case of a lady who eventually died of sarcoma

of the vertebræ, the specimens having been examined by J. H. C.
Simes of Philadelphia and myself. She was supposed at first and for
some time to be a case of hysteria with spinal irritation. In the case
of a distinguished naval officer, who died of malignant vertebral
disease after great suffering a short time since, this same mistake
was made during the early stages of the disease: his case was
pronounced to be one of neurasthenia, hysteria, etc. before its true
nature was finally discovered. The absence of muscular rigidity in the
back and extremities is the strongest point against vertebral disease
in these cases.
109 Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, vol. xii., No. 1, January, 1885.
In hysterical hemianæsthesia, ovarian hyperæsthesia, hystero-

epileptic seizures, ischuria, and other well-known hysterical
symptoms have usually been observed. The anæsthesia in
hysterical cases is most commonly on the left side of the body, but it
may happen to be so located in an organic case, so that this point is
only one of slight value.
Some older observers, as Briquet, who is quoted and criticised by

Charcot, believed that hemianæsthesia from encephalic lesions
differed from hysterical hemianæsthesia by the fact that in the former
case the skin of the face did not participate in the insensibility, or that
when it existed it never occupied the same side as the insensibility of
the limbs. Recently-reported cases have disproved the accuracy of
this supposed diagnostic mark. In his lectures, delivered ten years
ago, Charcot observed that up to that period anæsthesia of general
sensibility alone appeared to have been observed as a consecutive
on an alteration of the cerebral hemispheres, so that obtunding of
the special senses would remain as a distinctive characteristic of
hysterical hemianæsthesia. He, however, expected that cases of
cerebral organic origin would be reported of complete
hemianæsthesia, with derangements of the special senses, such as
is presented in hysteria. His anticipations have been fulfilled. In the
nervous wards of the Philadelphia Hospital is now a typical case of
organic hemianæsthesia in which the special senses are partially
involved.
Paralysis and contractures, if present, are apt to be accompanied in

cases of organic hemianæsthesia, after time has elapsed, by marked
nutritive changes, by wasting of muscle, and even of skin and bone.
This is not the case in hysteria.
The subsequent history of these two conditions is different. The

hysterical patient will often recover and relapse, or under proper
treatment may entirely recover; while all the treatment that can be
given in a case of organic hemianæsthesia will produce no decided
improvement, for there is a lesion in the brain which will remain for
ever. Hemianopsia, so far as I know, has not been observed in
hysterical hemianæsthesia.
In the monograph of Shaffer, with reference to both true and false

knee-joint affections certain conclusions are drawn which I will give
somewhat condensed:
Chronic synovitis produces very few if any subjective symptoms;

hysterical imitation presents a long train of both subjective and
objective symptoms and signs, the former in excess. Chronic ostitis
may be diagnosticated if muscular spasm cannot be overcome by
persistent effort; when the spasm does not vary night nor day; when
it is not affected by the ordinary doses of opium or chloral; when
reaction of the muscles to the faradic current is much reduced; when
a local and uniform rise of temperature over the affected articulation
is present; when purely involuntary neural symptoms, such as
muscular spasm, pain, and a cry of distress, are present. Hysterical
knee-joint is present, according to this author, when the muscular
rigidity or contracture is variable, and can be overcome by mildly
persistent efforts while the patient's mind is diverted, or which yields
to natural sleep, or which wholly disappears under the usual doses
of opium or chloral; when the faradic response is normal; when rise
of temperature is absent or a reduced temperature is present over
the joint; when variable and inconstant, emotional, and semi-
voluntary manifestations are present.
To recognize the neuromimesis of hip disease Shaffer gives the

following points: The limp is variable and suggests fatigue; it is much
better after rest; it almost invariably follows the pain. Pain of a
hyperæsthetic character is usually the first symptom, and it is found
most generally in the immediate region of the joint. “In place of an
apprehensive state in response to the tests applied will be found a
series of symptoms which are erratic and inconstant. A condition of
muscular rigidity often exists, but, unlike a true muscular spasm, it
can in most cases be overcome in the manner before stated. A very
perceptible degree of atrophy may exist—such, however, as would
arise from inertia only. A normal electrical contractility exists in all the
muscles of the thigh.”
In the neuromimesis of chronic spondylitis or hysterical spine the

pain is generally superficial, and is almost always located over or
near the spinous processes; it is sometimes transient, and frequently
changes its location from time to time; a normal degree of mobility of
the spinal column under properly directed manipulation is preserved;
the nocturnal cry and apprehensive expression of Pott's disease are
wanting.
With reference to the hysterical lateral curvature, Shaffer, quoting

Paget, says “ether or chloroform will help. You can straighten the
mimic contracture when the muscles cannot act; you cannot so
straighten a real curvature.”
In the diagnosis of local hysterical affections one point emphasized

by Skey is well worthy of consideration; and that is that local forms of
hysteria are often not seen because they are not looked for. “If,” says
he, “you will so focus your mental vision and endeavor to distinguish
the minute texture of your cases, and look into and not at them, you
will acknowledge the truth of the description, and you will adopt a
sound principle of treatment that meets disease face to face with a
direct instead of an oblique force.” According to Paget, the means for
diagnosis in these cases to be sought—(1) in what may be regarded
as the predisposition, the general condition of the nervous system,
on which, as in a predisposing constitution, the nervous mimicry of
disease is founded; (2) in the events by which, as by exciting
causes, the mimicry may be evoked and localized; (3) in the local
symptoms in each case.
Local symptoms as a means of diagnosis can sometimes be made

use of in general hysteria. A case may present symptoms of either
the gravest form of organic nervous disease or the gravest form of
hysteria, and be for a time in doubt, when suddenly some special
local manifestation appears which cannot be other than hysterical,
and which clinches the diagnosis. In a case with profound
anæsthesia, with paraplegia and marked contractures, with recurring
spasms of frightful character, the sudden appearance of aphonia and
apsithyria at once cleared all remaining doubt. Herbert Page
mentions the case of a man who suffered from marked paraplegia
and extreme emotional disturbance after a railway collision, who,
nine months after the accident, had an attack of aphonia brought on
suddenly by hearing of the death of a friend. He eventually
recovered.
To detect hysterical or simulated blindness the methods described by

Harlan are those adopted in my own practice. When the blindness is
in both eyes, optical tests cannot be applied. Harlan suggests
etherization.110 In a case of deception, conscious or unconscious, he
says, “as the effect of the anæsthetic passed off the patient would
probably recover the power of vision before his consciousness was
sufficiently restored to enable him to resume the deception.”
Hutchinson cured a case of deaf-dumbness by means of
etherization. For simulated monocular blindness Graefe's prism-test
may be used: “If a prism held before the eye in which sight is
admitted causes double vision, or when its axis is held horizontally a
corrective squint, vision with both eyes is rendered certain.” It should
be borne in mind that the failure to produce double images is not
positive proof of monocular blindness, for it is possible that the
person may see with either eye separately, but not enjoy binocular
vision, as in a case of squint, however slight. Instead of using a
prism while the patient is reading with both eyes at an ordinary
distance, say of fourteen or sixteen inches, on some pretext slip a
glass of high focus in front of the eye said to be sound. If the reading
is continued without change, of course the amaurosis is not real.
Other tests have been recommended, but these can usually be
made available.
110 Loc. cit.
The diagnosis of hysterical, simulated, or mimetic deafness is more

difficult than that of blindness. When the deafness is bilateral, the
difficulty is greater than when unilateral. The method by etherization
just referred to might be tried. Politzer in his work on diseases of the
ear111 makes the following suggestions: Whether the patient can be
wakened out of sleep by a moderately loud call seems to be the
surest experiment. But, as in total deafness motor reflexes may be
elicited by the concussion of loud sounds, care must be taken not to
go too near the person concerned and not to call too loudly. The
practical objection to this procedure in civil practice would seem to
be that we are not often about when our patients are asleep. In
unilateral deafness L. Müller's method is to use two tubes, through
which words are spoken in both ears at the same time. When
unilateral deafness is really present the patient will only repeat what
has been spoken in the healthy ear, while when there is simulation
he becomes confused, and will repeat the words spoken into the
seemingly deaf ear also. To avoid mistakes in using this method, a
low voice must be employed.
111 A Textbook of the Diseases of the Ear and Adjacent Organs, by Adam Politzer,
translated and edited by James Patterson Cassells, M.D., M. R. C. S. Eng., Philada.,
1883.
Mistakes in diagnosis where hysteria is in question are frequently

due to that association with it of serious organic disease of the
nervous system of which I have already spoken at length under
Complications. This is a fact which has not been overlooked by
authors and teachers, but one on which sufficient stress has not yet
been laid, and one which is not always kept in mind by the
practitioner. Bramwell says: “Cases are every now and again met
with in which serious organic disease (myelitis and poliomyelitis,
anterior, acute, for example) is said to be hysterical. Mistakes of this
description are often due to the fact that serious organic disease is
frequently associated with the general symptoms and signs of
hysteria; it is, in fact, essential to remember that all cases of
paraplegia occurring in hysterical patients are not necessarily
functional—i.e. hysterical; the presence of hysteria or a history of
hysterical fits is only corroborative evidence, and the (positive)
diagnosis of hysterical paraplegia should never be given unless the
observer has, after the most careful examination, failed to detect the
signs and symptoms of organic disease.”
PROGNOSIS.—Hysteria may terminate (1) in permanent recovery; (2)

in temporary recovery, with a tendency to relapse or to the
establishment of hysterical symptoms of a different character; (3) in
some other affection, as insanity, phthisis, or possibly sclerosis; (4) in
death, but the death in such cases is usually not the direct result of
hysteria, but of some accident. Death from intercurrent disorders
may take place in hysteria. It is altogether doubtful, however,
whether the affection which has been described as acute fatal
hysteria should be placed in the hysterical category. In the cases
reported the symptom-picture would in almost every instance seem
to indicate the probability of the hysteria having been simply a
complication of other disorders, such as epilepsy, eclampsia, and
acute mania.
As a rule, hysterical patients will not starve themselves. They may

refuse to take food in the presence of others, or may say they will not
eat at all; but they will in some cases at the same time get food on
the sly or hire their nurses or attendants to procure it for them. In
treating such cases a little watchfulness will soon enable the
physician to determine what is best to be done. By discovering them
in the act of taking food future deception can sometimes be
prevented. Hysterical patients do sometimes, however, persistently
refuse food. These cases may starve to death if let alone; and it is
important that the physician should promptly resort to some form of
forcible feeding before the nutrition of the patient has reached too
low an ebb. I have seen at least two cases of hysteria or hysterical
insanity in which patients were practically allowed to starve
themselves to death, but an occurrence of this kind is very rare.
Feeding by means of a stomach-tube, or, what is still better, by a
nasal tube, as is now so frequently practised among the insane,
should be employed. Nourishment should be administered
systematically in any way possible until the patient is willing to take
food in the ordinary way. In purposive cases some methods of
forcible feeding may prove of decided advantage. Its unpleasantness
will sometimes cause swallowing power to be regained.
Wunderlich112 has recorded the case of a servant-girl, aged nineteen,

who, after a succession of epileptiform fits, fell into a collapse and
died in two days. Other cases have been recorded by Meyer. Fagge
also speaks of the more chronic forms of hysteria proving fatal by
marasmus. He refers to two cases reported by Wilks, both of which
were diagnosticated as hysterical, and both of which died. Sir
William Gull describes a complaint which he terms anorexia nervosa
vel hysterica. It is attended with extreme wasting; pulse, respiration,
and temperature are low. The patients were usually between the
ages of sixteen and twenty-three: some died; others recovered under
full feeding and great care. In many of the reported fatal cases
careful inquiry must be made as to this question of hysteria being
simply a complication.
112 Quoted in The Principles and Practice of Medicine, by the late Charles Hilton
Fagge, M.D., F. R. C. P., etc., vol. i. 1886, p. 736.
Are not hysterical attacks sometimes fatal? With reference to one of

my cases this view was urged by the physician in attendance.
Gowers113 on this point says: “As a rule to which exceptions are
infinitely rare, hysterical attacks, however severe and alarming in
aspect, are devoid of danger. The attacks of laryngeal spasm
present the greatest apparent risk to life.” He refers to the paroxysms
of dyspnœa presented by a hemiplegic girl as really alarming in
appearance, even to those familiar with them. He refers also to a
case of Raynaud's114 in which the laryngeal and pharyngeal spasm
coexisted with trismus, and the patient died in a terrible paroxysm of
dyspnœa. The patient presented various other hysterical
manifestations, and a precisely similar attack had occurred
previously and passed away, but she had in the interval become
addicted to the hypodermic injection of morphia, and Raynaud
suggested that it might have been the effect of this on the nerve-
centres that caused the fatal termination. Such cases have been
described in France as the hydrophobic form of hysteria.
113 Epilepsy and Other Chronic Convulsive Diseases, by W. R. Gowers, M.D.,
London. 1881.
114 L'Union médical, March 15, 1881.
Patients may die in hysterical as in epileptic attacks from causes not

directly connected with the disease. One of these sources of danger
mentioned by Gowers is the tendency to fall on the face sometimes
met with in the post-epileptic state. He records an example of death
from this cause. He also details a case of running hysteria or
hystero-epilepsy, in which, after a series of fits lasting about four
hours, the child died, possibly from some intercurrent accident.
TREATMENT.—Grasset,115 speaking of the treatment of hysteria, says

that means of treating the paroxysm, of removing the anæsthesia, of
combating single symptoms, are perhaps to be found in abundance,
but the groundwork of the disease, the neurosis or morbid state, is
not attacked. Here he indicates a new and fruitful path. In his own
summing up, however, he can only say that the hysterical diathesis
offers fundamental grounds for the exhibition of arsenic, silver,
chloride of gold, and mineral waters!
115 Brain, January, 1884.
No doubt can exist that the prophylactic and hygienic treatment of

hysteria is of paramount importance. To education—using the term
education in a broad sense—before and above all, the most
important place must be given. It is sometimes better to remove
children from their home surroundings. Hysterical mothers develop
hysterical children through association and imitation. I can scarcely,
however, agree with Dujardin-Beaumetz that it is always a good plan
to place a girl in a boarding-school far from the city. It depends on
the school. A well-regulated institution may be a great blessing in
this direction; one badly-managed may become a hotbed of hysteria.
Recently I made some investigations into the working of the public-

school system of Philadelphia, particularly with reference to the
question of overwork and sanitation.116 I had special opportunities
during the investigations to study the influences of different methods
of education, owing to the fact that the public-school system of
Philadelphia is just now in a transition period. This system is in a
state of hopeful confusion—hopeful, because I believe that out of its
present condition will come eventually a great boon to Philadelphia.
At one end of the system, in the primary and the secondary schools,
a graded method of instruction has been introduced. The grammar
and the high schools are working on an ungraded or differently
graded method. I found still prevailing, particularly in certain of the
grammar schools for girls, although not to the same extent as a few
years since, methods of cramming and stuffing calculated above all
to produce hysteria and allied disorders in those predisposed to
them.
116 The results of these investigations were given in a lecture which was delivered in
the Girls' Normal School of Philadelphia before the Teachers' Institute of Philadelphia,
Dec. 11, 1885.
Education should be so arranged as to develop the brain by a

natural process—not from within outward; not from the centre to the
periphery; not from above downward; but as the nervous system
itself develops in its evolution from a lower to a higher order of
animals, from the simple to the more complex and more elaborate.
Any system of education is wrong, and is calculated to weaken and
worry an impressionable nervous system, which attempts to overturn
or change this order of the progress of a true development of the
brain. To develop the nervous system as it should be developed—
slowly, naturally, and evenly—it must also be fed, rested, and
properly exercised.
In those primary schools in which the graded method was best

carried out this process of helping natural development was pursued,
and the result was seen in contented faces, healthy bodies, and
cheerful workers. In future the result will be found in less chorea,
hysteria, and insanity.
To prevent the development of hysteria, parents and physicians

should direct every effort. The family physician who discovers a child
to be neurotic, and who from his knowledge of parents, ancestors,
and collateral relatives knows that a predisposition to hysteria or
some other neurosis is likely to be present, should exercise all the
moral influence which he possesses to have a healthy, robust
training provided. It is not within the scope of an article of this kind to
describe in great detail in what such education should consist.
Reynolds is correct when he says that “self-control should be
developed, the bodily health should be most carefully regarded, and
some motive or purpose should be supplied which may give force,
persistence, unity, and success to the endeavors of the patient.” In
children who have a tendency to the development of hysteria the
inclinations should not always or altogether be regarded in choosing
a method or pursuing a plan of education. It is not always to what
such a child takes that its mind should be constantly directed; but, on
the contrary, it is often well to educate it away from its inclination.
“The worst thing that can be done is that which makes the patient
know and feel that she is thought to be peculiar. Sometimes such
treatment is gratifying to her, and she likes it—it is easy and it seems
kind to give it—but it is radically wrong.”
In providing for the bodily health of hysterical children it should be

seen that exercise should be taken regularly and in the open air, but
over-fatigue should be avoided; that ample and pleasant recreation
should be provided; that study should be systematic and disciplinary,
but at the same time varied and interesting, and subservient to some
useful purpose; that the various functions of secretion, excretion,
menstruation should be regulated.
The importance of sufficient sleep to children who are predisposed to

hysteria or any other form of nervous or mental disorder can scarcely
be over-estimated. The following, according to J. Crichton Browne,117
is the average duration of sleep required at different ages: 4 years of
age, 12 hours; 7 years of age, 11 hours; 9 years of age, 10½ hours;
14 years of age, 10 hours; 17 years of age, 9½ hours; 21 years of
age, 9 hours; 28 years of age, 8 hours. To carefully provide that
children shall obtain this amount of sleep will do much to strengthen
the nervous system and subdue or eradicate hysterical tendencies.
Gymnastics, horseback riding, walking, swimming, and similar
exercises all have their advantages in preventing hysterical
tendencies.
117 Education and the Nervous System, reprinted from The Book of Health by
permission of Messrs. Cassell & Co., Limited.
Herz118 has some instructive and useful recommendations with

reference to the treatment of hysteria in children. It is first and most
important to rehabilitate the weakened organism, and especially the
central nervous system, by various dietetic, hygienic, and medicinal
measures. It is important next to tranquillize physical and mental
excitement. This can sometimes be done by disregard of the
affection, by neglect, or by removal or threatened removal of the
child from its surroundings. Such treatment should of course be
employed with great discretion. Anæmia and chlorosis, often present
in the youthful victims of hysteria, should be thoroughly treated. Care
should be taken to learn whether children of either sex practise
masturbation, which, Jacobi and others insist, frequently plays an
important part in the production of hysteria. Proper measures should
be taken to prevent this practice. The genital organs should receive
examination and treatment if this is deemed at all necessary. On the
other hand, care should be taken not to direct the attention of
children unnecessarily to those organs when they are entirely
innocent of such habits. Painting the vagina twice daily with a 10 per
cent. solution of hydrochlorate cocaine has been found useful in
subduing the hyper-irritation of the sexual organs in girls accustomed
to practise masturbation. Herz, with Henoch, prefers the hydrate of
chloral to all other medicines, although he regards morphine as
almost equally valuable, in the treatment of hysteria in children.
Personally, I prefer the bromides to either morphia or chloral. Small
doses of iron and arsenic continued systematically for a long period
will be found useful. Politzer of Vienna regards the hydrobromate
and bihydrobromate of iron as two valuable preparations in the
hysteria of children, and exhibits them in doses of four to seven
grains three to four times daily.
118 Wien. Med. Wochen., No. 46, Nov. 14, 1885.
Hysteria once developed, it is the moral treatment which often really

cures. The basis of this method of cure is to rouse the will. It is
essential to establish faith in the mind of the patient. She must be
made to feel not only that she can be helped, but that she will be.
Every legitimate means also should be taken to impress the patient
with the idea that her case is fully understood. If malingering or
partial malingering enters into the problem, the patient will then feel
that she has been detected, and will conclude that she had better get
out of her dilemma as gracefully as possible. Where simulation does
not enter faith is an important nerve-stimulant and tonic; it unchains
the will.
Many physicians have extraordinary ideas about hysteria, and

because of these adopt remarkable and sometimes outrageous
methods of treatment. They find a woman with hysterical symptoms,
and forthwith conclude she is nothing but a fraud. They are much
inclined to assert their opinions, not infrequently to the patient
herself, and, if not directly to her, in her hearing to other patients or
to friends, relatives, nurses, or physicians. They threaten, denounce,
and punish—the latter especially in hospitals. In general practice
their course is modified usually by the wholesome restraint which the
financial and other extra-hospital relations of patient and physician
enforce.
Although hysterical patients often do simulate and are guilty of fraud,

it should never be forgotten that some hysterical manifestations may
be for the time being beyond the control of patients. Even for some
of the frauds which are practised the individuals are scarcely
responsible, because of the weakness of their moral nature and their
lack of will-power. Moral treatment in the form of reckless harshness
becomes immoral treatment. The liability to mistake in diagnosis,
and the frequent association of organic disease with hysterical
symptoms, should make the physician careful and conservative. It is
also of the highest importance often that the doctor should not show
his hand. The fact that an occasional cure, which is usually
temporary, is effected by denunciation, and even cruelty, is not a
good argument against the stand taken here.
Harsh measures should only be adopted after due consideration and

by a well-digested method. A good plan sometimes is, after carefully
examining the patient, to place her on some simple, medicinal, and
perhaps electrical treatment, taking care quietly to prophesy a
speedy cure. If this does not work, in a few days other severe or
more positive measures may be used, perhaps blistering or strong
electrical currents. Later, but in rare cases only, after giving the
patient a chance to arouse herself by letting her know what she may
expect, painful electrical currents, the hot iron, the cold bath, or
similar measures may be used. Such treatment, however, should
never be used as a punishment.
The method of cure by neglect can sometimes be resorted to with

advantage. The ever-practical Wilks mentions the case of a school-
teacher with hemianalgesia, hemianæsthesia, and an array of other
hysterical symptoms who had gone through all manner of treatment,
and at the end of seven months was no better. The doctor simply left
her alone. He ordered her no drugs, and regularly passed by her
bed. In three weeks he found her sitting up. She talked a little and
had some feeling in her right side. She was now encouraged, and
made rapid progress to recovery. Neglect had aroused her dormant
powers. It must be said that a treatment of this kind can be carried
out with far more prospects of success in a general hospital than in a
private institution or at the home of a patient. It is a method of
treatment which may fail or succeed according to the tact and
intelligence of the physician.
I cannot overlook here the consideration of the subject of the so-

called faith cure and mind cure. One difference between the faith
cure as claimed and practised by its advocates, and by those who
uphold it from a scientific standpoint, is simply that the latter do not
refer the results obtained to any supernatural or spiritual agency. I
would not advise the establishment of prayer-meetings for the relief
of hysteria, but would suggest that the power of faith be exercised to
its fullest extent in a legitimate way.
A young lady is sick, and for two years is seen by all the leading
doctors in London; a clergyman is asked in and prays over her, and
she gets up and walks. The doctors all join in and say the case was
one of hysteria—that there was nothing the matter with her. Then,
says Wilks, “Why was the girl subjected to local treatment and doses
of physic for years? Why did not the doctors do what the parson
did?”
Tuke119 devotes a chapter to psychotherapeutics, which every

physician who is called upon to treat hysteria should read. He
attempts to reduce the therapeutic use of mental influence to a
practical, working basis. I will formulate from Tuke and my own
experience certain propositions as to the employment of
psychological measures: (1) It is often important and always
justifiable to inspire confidence and hope in hysterical patients by
promising cures when it is possible to achieve cures. (2) A physician
may sometimes properly avail himself of his influence over the
emotions of the patient in the treatment of hysterical patients, but
always with great caution and discretion. (3) Every effort should be
made to excite hysterical patients to exert the will. (4) In some
hysterical cases it is advisable to systematically direct the attention
to a particular region of the body, arousing at the same time the
expectation of a certain result. (5) Combined mental and physical
procedures may sometimes be employed. (6) Hypnotism may be
used in a very few cases.
119 Influence of the Mind upon the Body.
The importance of employing mental impression is thoroughly

exemplified, if nothing else is accomplished, by a study of such a
craze as the so-called mind cure. Not a few people of supposed
sense and cultivation have pinned their faith to this latest Boston
hobby. A glance at the published writings of the apostles of the mind
cure will show at once to the critical mind that all in it of value is
dependent upon the effects of mental impression upon certain
peculiar natures, some of them being of a kind which afford us not a
few of our cases of hysteria. W. F. Evans has published several
works upon the subject. From one of these120 I have sought, but not
altogether successfully, to obtain some ideas as to the basis of the
mind-cure treatment. It is claimed that the object is to construct a
theoretical and practical system of phrenopathy, or mental cure, on
the basis of the idealistic philosophy of Berkeley, Fichte, Schelling,
and Hegel. The fundamental doctrine of those who believe in the
mental cure is, that to think and to exist are one and the same, and
that every disease is a translation into a bodily expression of a fixed
idea of mind. If by any therapeutic device the morbid idea can be
removed, the cure of the malady is assured. When the patient is
passive, and consequently impressible, he is made to fix his
thoughts with expectant attention upon the effect to be produced.
The physician thinks to the same effect, wills it, and believes and
imagines that it is being done; the mental action to the patient,
sympathizing with that of the physician, is precipitated upon the
body, and becomes a silent, transforming, sanitive energy. It must
be, says Evans, “a malady more than ordinarily obstinate that is
neither relieved nor cured by it.”
120 The Divine Law of Cure.
Hysteria cannot be cured by drugs alone, and yet a practitioner of

medicine would find it extremely difficult to manage some cases
without using drugs. Drugs themselves, used properly, may have a
moral or mental as well as a physical influence. Among those which
have been most used from before the days of Sydenham to the
present time, chiefly for their supposed or real antispasmodic virtues,
are galbanum, asafœtida, valerian, castor and musk, opium, and
hyoscyamus. The value of asafœtida, valerian, castor, and musk is
chiefly of a temporary character. If these drugs are used at all, they
should be used in full doses frequently repeated. Sumbul, a drug of
the same class comparatively little used, is with me a favorite. It can
be used in the form of tincture or fluid extract, from twenty minims to
half a drachm of the latter or one to two drachms of the former. It
certainly has in many cases a remarkably calmative effect.
Opium and its preparations, so strongly recommended by some, and
especially the Germans, should not be used except in rare cases.
Occasionally in a case with sleeplessness or great excitement it may
be absolutely indispensable to resort to it in combination with some
other hypnotic or sedative. The danger, however, in other cases of
forming the opium habit should not be overlooked. According to
Dujardin-Beaumetz, it is mainly useful in the asthenic forms of
hysteria.
Of all drugs, the metallic tonics are to be preferred in the continuous

treatment of hysteria. Iron, although not called for in a large
percentage of cases, will sometimes prove of great service in the
weak and anæmic hysterics. Chalybeates are first among the drugs
mentioned by Sydenham. Steel was his favorite. The subcarbonate
or reduced iron, or the tincture of the chloride, is to be preferred to
the more fanciful and elegant preparations with which the drug-
market is now flooded. Dialyzed iron and the mallate of iron,
however, are known to be reliable preparations, and can be resorted
to with advantage. They should be given in large doses. Zinc salts,
particularly the oxide, phosphide, and valerianate; the nitrate or
oxide of silver, the ammonio-sulphate of copper, ferri-ferrocyanide or
Prussian blue,—all have a certain amount of real value in giving tone
to the nervous system in hysterical cases.
To Niemeyer we owe the use of chloride of sodium and gold in the

treatment of hysteria. He refers to the fact that Martini of Biberach
regarded this article as an efficient remedy against the various
diseases of the womb and ovaries. He believed that the
improvement effected upon Martini's patient was probably due to the
fact that this, like other metallic remedies, was an active nervine. He
prescribed the chloride of gold and sodium in the form of a pill in the
dose of one-eighth of a grain. Of these pills he at first ordered one to
be taken an hour after dinner, and another an hour after supper.
Later, he ordered two to be taken at these hours, and gradually the
dose was increased up to eight pills daily. I frequently use this salt
after the method of Niemeyer.
The treatment of hysteria which Mitchell has done so much to make
popular, that by seclusion, rest, massage, and electricity, is of value
in a large number of cases of grave hysteria; but the proper selection
of cases for this treatment is all important. Playfair121 says correctly
that if this method of treatment is indiscriminately employed, failure
and disappointment are certain to result. The most satisfactory
results are to be had in the thoroughly broken-down and bed-ridden
cases. “The worse the case is,” he says, “the more easy and certain
is the cure; and the only disappointments I have had have been in
dubious, half-and-half cases.”
121 The Systematic Treatment of Nerve-Prostration and Hysteria, by W. S. Playfair,
M.D., F. R. C. P., 1883.
Mitchell122 gives a succinct, practical description of the process of

massage: “An hour,” he says, “is chosen midway between two
meals, and, the patient lying in bed, the manipulator starts at the
feet, and gently but firmly pinches up the skin, rolling it lightly
between his fingers, and going carefully over the whole foot; then the
toes are bent and moved about in every direction; and next, with the
thumbs and fingers, the little muscles of the foot are kneaded and
pinched more largely, and the interosseous groups worked at with
the finger-tips between the bones. At last the whole tissues of the
foot are seized with both hands and somewhat firmly rolled about.
Next, the ankles are dealt with in the same fashion, all the crevices
between the articulating bones being sought out and kneaded, while
the joint is put in every possible position. The leg is next treated—
first by surface pinching and then by deeper grasping of the areolar
tissue, and last by industrious and deeper pinching of the large
muscular masses, which for this purpose are put in a position of the
utmost relaxation. The grasp of the muscles is momentary, and for
the large muscles of the calf and thigh both hands act, the one
contracting as the other loosens its grip. In treating the firm muscles
in front of the leg the fingers are made to roll the muscles under the
cushions of the finger-tips. At brief intervals the manipulator seizes
the limb in both hands and lightly runs the grasp upward, so as to
favor the flow of venous blood-currents, and then returns to the
kneading of the muscles. The same process is carried on in every
part of the body, and especial care is given to the muscles of the
loins and spine, while usually the face is not touched. The belly is
first treated by pinching the skin, then by deeply grasping and rolling
the muscular walls in the hands, and at last the whole belly is
kneaded with the heel of the hand in a succession of rapid, deep
movements, passing around in the direction of the colon.”
122 “Fat and Blood,” etc.
Massage should often be combined with the Swedish movement

cure. In the movement cure one object is to call out the suppressed
will of the patient. This is very applicable to cases of hysteria. The
cure of cases of this kind is often delayed by using massage alone,
which is absolutely passive. These movements are sometimes
spoken of as active and passive, or as single and duplicated. Active
movements are those more or less under the control of the individual
making or taking part in them, and they are performed under the
advice or direction, and sometimes with the assistance, of another.
They proceed from within; they are willed. Passive movements come
from without; they are performed on the patient and independently of
her will. She is subjected to pushings and pullings, to flexions and
extensions, to swingings and rotations, which she can neither help
nor hinder. The same movement may be active or passive according
to circumstances. A person's biceps may be exercised through the
will, against the will, or with reference to the will.
A single movement is one in which only a single individual is

engaged; speaking medically, single movements are those executed
by the patient under the direction of the physician or attendant; they
are, of course, active. Duplicated active movements require more
than one for their performance. In these the element of resistance
plays an important part. The operator with carefully-considered
exertion performs a movement which the patient is enjoined to resist,
or the latter undertakes a certain motion or series of motions which
the former, with measured force, resists. Still, tact and experience
are here of great value, in order that both direct effort and resistance
should be carefully regulated and properly modified to suit all the
requirements of the case. By changing the position of the patient or
the manner of operating on her from time to time any muscles or
groups of muscles may be brought into play. It is wonderful with what
ease even some of the smallest muscles can be exercised by an
expert manipulator.
The duplicated active movements are those which should be most

frequently performed or attempted in connection with massage in
hysterical patients. The very substance of this treatment is to call out
that which is wanting in hysteria—will-power. It is a coaxing,
insinuating treatment, and one which will enable the operator to gain
control of the patient in spite of herself. As the patient exerts her
power the operator should yield and allow the part to be moved.
Much of the value of massage and Swedish movements, in hysteria

as in other disorders, is self-evident. Acceleration of circulation,
increase of temperature, direct and reflex stimulation of nervous and
muscular action, the promotion of absorption by pressure,—these
and other results are readily understood. “The mode in which these
gymnastic proceedings exert an influence,” says Erb,123 “consists, no
doubt, in occasioning frequently-repeated voluntary excitations of the
nerves and muscles, so that the act of conduction to the muscles is
gradually rendered more facile, and ultimately the nutrition of the
nerves and muscles is augmented.”
123 Ziemssen's Cyclopædia.
The objects to be attained by the use of electricity are nearly the

same as from massage and duplicated active movements: in the first
place, to improve the circulation and the condition of the muscles;
and in the second place, to make the patient use the muscles. The
faradic battery should be employed in these cases, and the patient
should be in a relaxed condition, preferably in bed. A method of
electrical treatment introduced some years ago by Beard and
Rockwell is known as general faradization. This is sometimes used
in the office of the physician. In this method the patient is placed in a
chair with his feet on a large plate covered with chamois-skin; the

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Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and

Refugees Lyndsey Stonebridge

LY N DSE Y STON E BR I DGE

For the East End boys,

Preface and Acknowledgements

There are few memorials to the victims of forced displacement. Refugees

viii Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n ts

homes, but from the panicked insecurity of the rights-rich, we see it in

Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n tsix

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction: Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees 1

1. Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in

xiv List of I llust r at ions

11. Children ‘old beyond their years’ drinking milk in Gaza.

Everywhere the word ‘exile’ which once had an undertone of almost

2 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 3

1940s raised the spectre of rightlessness in uncompromising terms, those

4 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 5

6 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 7

8 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 9

10 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

By being out of place, Nabokov is actually ‘profoundly of our time’. Steiner’s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 11

Mass displacement is the product of modern violence and oppression:

12 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

(her phrase) endemic to colonialism, spread across to the West.The question

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 13

14 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

modern refugee, but are fundamentally intrinsic to its unfolding—and

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 15

16 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

prevented it from comprehensively succeeding in its historical mission to

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 17

nationalism, the granting of refugee rights was in effect a lockdown that, at

owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion,

18 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

the consequences of mass displacement, Lauterpacht’s dream of all being

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 19

20 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 21

destroy. Hence the importance of avoiding the language and structure of

22 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 23

(between 1945–6) ‘L’Expulsé’ (October 1946), and ‘Le Calmant’ (December

24 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

identity became the organizing principle of state formation. As the United

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 25

30 Place le ss People: W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s

The banality of exile

Kemper109 relates the case of a lady who eventually died of sarcoma

In hysterical hemianæsthesia, ovarian hyperæsthesia, hystero-

Some older observers, as Briquet, who is quoted and criticised by

Paralysis and contractures, if present, are apt to be accompanied in

The subsequent history of these two conditions is different. The

In the monograph of Shaffer, with reference to both true and false

Chronic synovitis produces very few if any subjective symptoms;

To recognize the neuromimesis of hip disease Shaffer gives the

In the neuromimesis of chronic spondylitis or hysterical spine the

With reference to the hysterical lateral curvature, Shaffer, quoting

Pr e face a n d Ack now le dge m e n tsix

List of Illustrations xiii

Introduction: Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees 1

1. Affidavit of Identity in Lieu of Passport: ‘I wish to use this document in

11. Children ‘old beyond their years’ drinking milk in Gaza.

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 3

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 5

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 7

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 9

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 11

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 13

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 15

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 17

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 19

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 21

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 23

W r i t i ng, R igh ts, a n d R e f uge e s 25