James Joyce, Displacement, Human Rights: Introduction

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Joyce—as a "voluntary exile" and at times a forcibly displaced person—wrote at a time of colonialism, rebellions against imperialism, civil wars, world wars, genocidal persecutions, and the global movements of people. Migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers: these are the people fated to survive—if they survive—in what Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism calls the "barbed-wire labyrinth" of degrees of statelessness. Although Joyce was never forced into conditions of absolute statelessness as Jews in territories controlled by Nazis and Fascists were forced, his family and he were subjected to displacements from Austro-Hungarian Trieste during World War I and from Vichy France during World War II. This essay reconsiders these displacements, as well as Joyce's assistance to Jews to escape Nazi control, in relation to current global displacements and concerns about human rights. To write the history of the future—albeit a "future conditional"—Joyce explores the structural social injustices and power asymmetries of the past that still haunt and control the present. Of the over 103 million forcibly displaced people throughout the globe (approximately 1 of every 77 people worldwide), the majority will remain stateless for more than 15 years—or permanently—because no state acknowledges political or moral responsibility for them. By seldom admitting any but de jure refugees, governments refuse obligations to others who are stateless, rendering them politically, legally, and ontologically invisible. Belonging "to no internationally recognizable community whatever," they are thus, Arendt suggests in Responsibility and Judgment , outside "of mankind as a whole." The "future conditional" Joyce envisions, especially in Ulysses , stems from an ethics of commitment to those whose humanity others devalue.