Moving

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3 details the crisis of movement that followed the Second World War, a crisis, as contemporary historical accounts detailed, that had two poles: forced movement and forced stasis. Defining this polarity as the dialectic of displacement, the chapter considers how mid-century authors sought to re-inscribe the primacy of human movement and to reimagine its political dynamics. Drawing on Thomas Nail’s conceptualization of the figure of the migrant, the chapter addresses: Fanon’s intricate account of movement in the hostile environment of the colonial setting; the implications for movement of the Universal Declaration, noting its suspension of the question of eligibility and its contradictory formulation of the right to asylum; Arendt’s articulation of a politics of arrival rooted in the principle of natality; and Olson’s development of a poetics of movement at the level of individual physiology and political geography. The chapter thus reasserts and reimagines the right to freedom of movement.