Writing Against Expulsion

Professor David Herd's book, Writing Against Expulsion in the Post-War World: Making Space for the Human (Oxford University Press, 2023) has been shortlisted for the 2024 MSA (Modernist Studies Association) Book Award.

Writing Against Expulsion tells a pre-history of the Hostile Environment. Its starting point is the rapidly escalating use of detention as a response to human movement and the global production of geopolitical non-personhood in which detention results. Drawing on histories of forced displacement, eye witness accounts, international legal documents, and on a range of emblematic cross-disciplinary texts and authors — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Hannah Arendt, Charles Olson, Frantz Fanon — the book shows how mid-century writers both documented the lived experience of expulsion and asserted ways of thinking and acting by which expulsion could be prevented.

In shortlisting the book, the MSA panel noted that Writing Against Expulsion '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'.