Sponsored by the Harvey Goldberg Center and the Department of History.
Today, no one thinks of Britain as a land of camps. Instead, camps seem to happen “elsewhere,” from Greece to Palestine to the global South. Yet from the 1930s to the 1980s, dozens of British refugee camps housed tens of thousands of Jews, Basques, Poles, Hungarians, Anglo-Egyptians, Ugandan Asians, and Vietnamese.Within these camps, refugees shared space with Britons who had been displaced by war and poverty, generating unique intimacies and frictions. This talk explores how these camps have shaped today’s multicultural Britain, 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, Bailkin offers warnings from a liberal democracy’s recent past.