Jordanna Bailkin. Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain.

Abstract

Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a survivor of Auschwitz, called the twentieth century “the century of the refugee.” In Unsettled: Refugee Camps and the Making of Multicultural Britain, Jordanna Bailkin demonstrates that in Britain it was the century of the refugee camp. These camps are at the center of her fine study, which sets them in the wider context of the history of encampment and its colonial origins and traces their history from the Belgian refugee camps of the First World War through to the camps for Vietnamese refugees in the 1980s. The voices of refugees thread their way through the book, speaking from the camps or speaking about them after moving on. Sometimes, as these voices testify, moving on—at least initially—was to another camp, and some refugees never moved on. This is a thought-provoking book that raises many questions—about the role of empire in this history, the freedom of refugees, the blurring of boundaries between refuge and detention and between migrants, citizens, and refugees at different moments, and who counted—or counted themselves—as a refugee. It challenges the pervasive forgettings of refugee camps in Britain and the tendency to remember only those aspects of this history that reflect well on the British. Organized thematically, it covers the physical structure of camps and their widespread locations, the organization of mass feeding, the impact camps had on people’s ethnic, religious, and gender identities and on their family life, refugees’ activism—from petitions through refusal to accept the label “refugee” to violence—and the mixing of people of different religions, ethnicities, and social class.