Herd tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment, returning to a period, following the Second World War, when the brutal consequences of a politics of expulsion were visible. The book is a deep defence of human rights at a moment when such rights are under attack. It shows how we can resist and think beyond the politics of border and nation.
Writing against Expulsion in the Post-War World is a timely and politically urgent study that connects postwar experiences of forced displacement and mass migration with our contemporary moment. Herd traces an important history of the "geopolitical non-person"-a dehumanized individual whose essential rights have been suspended. Reading poetic and philosophical works by Charles Olson, Hannah Arendt, and Frantz Fanon alongside first-hand accounts, government policies, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Herd makes a powerful case for the relevance of literary analysis to real-life legal and political dilemmas. Blurring the boundaries between literary scholarship and activism, Herd delivers nothing less than a manifesto against the current political climate where detention, expulsion, and deportation have come to define the very conditions of civic life.
