In 1941, Hannah Arendt wrote that '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'. The year before, Arendt had been forced into an internment camp, Gurs, in southern France, which had originally been built to receive refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Her life, her writing, her political thought and her conception of what it meant to be human, what it meant to be humanitarian, and how we can navigate the world as citizens as well as people, was shaped by this personal experience in the midst of the world-shattering war that did so much to create the modern category of the 'refugee'. Lyndsey Stonebridge, in this book, makes a powerful case for pushing historians, literary scholars, political scientists and others to think more critically and creatively about the intersections between literature, language, political thought and the creation and framing of categories of humanity such as citizen, exile and refugee.
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