Overview

In this unique ""history from below,"" Destination Elsewhere chronicles encounters between displaced persons in Europe and the Allied agencies who were tasked with caring for them after the Second World War. The struggle to define who was a displaced person and who was not was a subject of intense debate and deliberation among humanitarians, international law experts, immigration planners, and governments. What has not adequately been recognized is that displaced persons also actively participated in this emerging refugee conversation. Displaced persons endured war, displacement, and resettlement, but these experiences were not defined by passivity and speechlessness. Instead, they spoke back, creating a dialogue that in turn helped shape the modern idea of the refugee. As Ruth Balint shows, what made a good or convincing story at the time tells us much about the circulation of ideas about the war, the Holocaust, and the Jews. Those stories depict the emerging moral and legal distinction between economic migrants and political refugees. They tell us about the experiences of women and children in the face of new psychological and political interventions into the family. Stories from displaced persons also tell us something about the enduring myth of the new world for people who longed to leave the old. Balint focuses on those persons whose storytelling skills became a major strategy for survival and escape out of the displaced persons' camps and out of the Europe. Their stories are brought to life in Destination Elsewhere, alongside a new history of immigration, statelessness, and the institution of the postwar family.

Full Product Details

9781501760211

Table of Contents

Reviews

Ruth Balint's immensely readable and highly original book Destination Elsewhere adds to [the] scholarship. What makes her contribution particularly valuable is her concern not so much with the IRO or the reception of DPs in Australia and elsewhere, but with the DP experience. * Inside Story * Destination Elsewhere is clearly a major work, based on exceptional research that humanises and gives agency to post-war refugees. * History Australia *

Ruth Balint's immensely readable and highly original book Destination Elsewhere adds to [the] scholarship. What makes her contribution particularly valuable is her concern not so much with the IRO or the reception of DPs in Australia and elsewhere, but with the DP experience. * Inside Story * Destination Elsewhere is clearly a major work, based on exceptional research that humanises and gives agency to post-war refugees. * History Australia *

Ruth Balint's immensely readable and highly original book Destination Elsewhere adds to [the] scholarship. What makes her contribution particularly valuable is her concern not so much with the IRO or the reception of DPs in Australia and elsewhere, but with the DP experience. * Inside Story *

Author Information

Ruth Balint is Associate Professor of History at University of New South Wales. She is the author of Troubled Waters and coauthor of Smuggled.

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