Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain, 1930s-1980s

FAIN: FA-58459-15

Jordanna Bailkin
University of Washington (Seattle, WA 98195-1016)

This book will be the first to explore Britain’s distinctive culture of encampment. I analyze camps for Jewish, Polish, Hungarian, Anglo-Egyptian, Ugandan Asian, and Vietnamese refugees from the 1930s to the 1980s in order to rethink the larger story of the making of multiculturalism in Britain and to illuminate episodes of encampment in our own world. These camps, peopled by a fractious mix of British squatters, migrant activists of color, ex-colonial officials and volunteers, as well as refugees generated unique interactions and intimacies. Refugee camps in Britain allow us to understand the proximity of individuals and groups that scholars have traditionally kept separate: not only hosts and migrants, but also refugee populations across ethnicity and time. "Resettlement," I argue, could be deeply unsettling--both to its participants, and to the categories upon which historians have relied.

Associated Products

Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain (Book)
Title: Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain
Author: Jordanna Bailkin
Abstract: Today, no one really thinks of Britain as a land of camps. Camps seem to happen "elsewhere", from Greece, to Palestine, to the global South. Yet over the course of the twentieth century, dozens of British refugee camps housed hundreds of thousands of Belgians, Jews, Basques, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians, and Vietnamese. Refugee camps in Britain were never only for refugees. Refugees shared a space with Britons who had been displaced by war and poverty, as well as thousands of civil servants and a fractious mix of volunteers. Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain explores how these camps have shaped today's multicultural Britain. They generated unique intimacies and frictions, illuminating the closeness of individuals that have traditionally been kept separate--"citizens" and "migrants", but also refugee populations from diverse countries and conflicts. As the world's refugee crisis once again brings to Europe the challenges of mass encampment, Unsettled offers warnings from a liberal democracy's recent past. Through lively anecdotes from interviews with former camp residents and workers Unsettled conveys the vivid, everyday history of refugee camps, which witnessed births and deaths, love affairs and violent conflicts, strikes and protests, comedy and tragedy. Their story--like that of today's refugee crisis--is one of complicated intentions that played out in unpredictable ways. The aim of this book is not to redeem camps--nor, indeed, to condemn them. It is to refuse to ignore them. Unsettled speaks to all who are interested in the plight of the encamped, and the global uses of encampment in our present world.
Year: 2018
Primary URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/unsettled-9780198814214?cc=us&lang=en&
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780198814214
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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