Refugee Figures: Writing Statelessness at Midcentury

A review of Lyndsey Stonebridge’s Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees (Oxford University Press, 2018)

For those working in contemporary literature or the long twentieth century, it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the implications of human rights. At first a more specialized topic within law and literature, the discourse of human rights has quickly grown into its own field, with journals, conferences, and academic programs of study dedicated to the subject. Human rights have also shaped the discipline of literary studies, influencing what gets read and taught. From canon formation to market values, student interests to curricular planning, established methods to current theoretical debates, the logic of human rights has a pervasive influence on the ways we read and teach now. Lyndsey Stonebridge’s excellent Placeless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees is a welcome addition to this interdisciplinary field as well as to the broader field of twentieth-century literary and cultural studies. A prominent scholar of British midcentury literature and culture, Stonebridge’s previous monographs include The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg (2011) and The Writing of Anxiety: Imagining Wartime in Mid-Century British Culture (2007), as well as earlier work on psychoanalysis, particularly on Melanie Klein. Taken together, her scholarship asserts the importance of studying the long after-lives of wartime violence and how various artists, intellectuals, and institutions have sought to represent the lingering ramifications of war in postwar life.

Contemporary Literature (Fall 2019) || https://muse.jhu.edu/article/763826

[image: Gurs internment camp]