Unsettled

Dramatic scenes of arrival at ports and airports play an iconic role in the representation of refugees in both the contemporary media and the historical imagination. Much less well represented, as Jordanna Bailkin observes, are the aftermaths of these arrivals, more specifically the times and spaces ‘in between’ the moment of debarkation and the ‘end point’ of integration—or its failure. Bailkin’s excellent book addresses this gap in our understanding of displacement and resettlement in Britain by examining the experiences of populations sheltered in refugee camps over the course of the twentieth century. As Bailkin points out, few people would identify the British mainland as the site of refugee camps, but this richly researched book reveals how the practice of ‘encampment’ endured in Britain from the arrival of Belgians during the First World War to the arrivals of Vietnamese refugees in the early 1980s. This book charts the experiences of the refugees and other groups who inhabited these camps and their interactions with local communities, the state and voluntary organizations

Archaeology · Displaced person · Displacement (psychology · Ethnology · Mainland · Multiculturalism · Political science · Politics · Refugee · Representation (politics · Sociology · State (computer science · Vietnamese · Diverse Historical and Scientific Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies · Gender Studies · History · Law