How did ordinary working people imagine their political communities and futures within displacement and conflict in Khartoum, and how did they try to turn these ideas into action? The introduction sets out the book’s key intervention in African intellectual histories, opening up working-class and displaced people’s political projects outside of print media and universities, built around exploitative jobs, surveillance, and everyday violence and racism within the war. Challenging current political analyses of modern African civil wars, it also explores its wider contributions to ideas of Blackness and racial identification in modern Sudanese and African histories, and to urban histories of displacement and refuge, setting intellectual history within its practical and time-consuming context of long bus rides, paperwork, jobs, and racist policing. The Introduction also outlines the methodological basis in a creative but fragmentary archive and competing translations and interpretations, setting out a structure for the following chapters.

This essay revisits the relationship between Clare’s mental and physical health and his writings by considering the importance of taking him on his own terms. Appraising the critical history of diagnostic approaches towards Clare’s mental and physical distress, it suggests that such categoric approaches to the poet’s psychophysiological life are unsatisfactory. It turns instead to a key term that Clare used repeatedly to describe his varied forms of disorder – his ‘indisposition’ – and argues that it remains important to Clare and to us as readers of him because of its dislocating and indecisive potential. Considering his unsettled position within the medical and literary culture in which he lived, and broadening the range of his medical encounters and vocabulary beyond the narrow context of the asylum, the essay discuss Clare’s symptoms and his poetic representations of them as entangled with his mobility across, and unstable status within, different places, social worlds, and identities.

This chapter introduces cases motivating the book and presents a three-step argument about the effects of forced migration on societal cooperation, state capacity, and economic development. It reviews evidence from post-WWII displacement in Poland and West Germany, discusses the applicability of the findings to other cases, and highlights the main contributions of the book.

The book of Isaiah reflects many of the population movements that took place in the period of its formation. Much biblical scholarship focuses on “the (Babylonian) Exile,” but as C. L. Crouch points out in “Isaiah and Migration,” mass population movements were carried out in the sphere of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians long before the Babylonians overthrew Jerusalem. She also calls attention to the migrations experienced by other nations, and to forces of displacement other than deportation, such as warfare, famine, and natural disasters. She analyzes the literary reception of these numerous involuntary migrations, and the ways in which the prophet and his audiences made sense of them.

This chapter provides the historical background necessary to understand the book’s empirical analysis. It discusses the political decisions that led to the displacement of Germans and Poles at the end of WWII and challenges the assumption that uprooted communities were internally homogeneous. It then zooms in on the process of uprooting and resettlement and introduces data on the size and heterogeneity of the migrant population in postwar Poland and West Germany.

Chapter 6 examines the devastating toll that the development of the hydropower nation took on people’s lives. In Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi, over 430,000 people were forced to leave their homes and communities due to the construction of the Sanmenxia Dam. This chapter focuses on the resettlement of over 7,000 residents from Henan to Gansu, revealing how the state’s pursuit of hydroelectricity not only altered the Yellow River’s physical landscape but also caused irreparable harm to the affected communities.

Chapter 4 is about the fate of the families whose land the military regime’s big reservoirs flooded. It covers the twenty-year period from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, when reservoir floodwaters expelled farmers and Indigenous communities from their homes, sending them to uncertain fates. This chapter argues that the military government mostly ignored the social costs of its big dams because it felt pressure to build them quickly and cheaply and becuase it believed its pharaonic environmentalism would satisfy its critics. The military regime provided scant resources to help displaced communities transition to new homes and unfamiliar subsistence practices, and many were left to start anew with almost no financial compensation. For the generals, it helped that most of these people were poor and from racially marginalized groups that had little political clout. Nevertheless, organizations and community leaders associated with the Catholic Church – then under the influence of liberation theology – helped organize dispossessed communities, some of whom succeeded in earning more just compensation.

Chapter 7 covers the changing nature of dam building in Brazil during the 1990s–2010s. It argues that during this period, mobilization for social and environmental justice among dam-affected communities began to play a greater role in the county’s dam-building program and that the movement’s priorities and achievements were not uniform. Brazil’s anti-dam movement has succeeded in modifying many new dams or blocking them outright, especially in the Amazon Rainforest, but has done little to achieve justice for the still-uncompensated Indigenous communities that were displaced by the dictatorship’s reservoirs. More than thirty years after being displaced, the Avá Guarani and the Tuxá, the Indigenous communities dispossessed by Itaipu and Itaparica, respectively, are still fighting for the land the government owes them. Climate-related challenges have been a second defining element of this period. Since the late 1990s, the Brazilian hydropower sector has endured at least three significant droughts that lowered reservoir levels, curtailing output and leading to rolling blackouts. Such episodes could become more common and severe under anthropogenic global warming. Thus, while the Brazilian hydropower sector has done much to mitigate carbon emissions, the impacts of anthropogenic warming threaten to curtail the degree to which reservoirs can produce such valuable low-carbon energy.

Chapter 6 tells the story of the Balbina Dam. Built during the 1980s, it was the military regime’s last and most controversial dam, and it encapsulates this book’s main arguments. Political pressures were instrumental in the decision to build the dam, whose floodwaters inundated a large area of the Amazon Rainforest that was inhabited by the Waimiri-Atroari Indigenous community. Instead of investing in meaningful environmental safeguards, the government planned an ostentatious greenwashing campaign. The result was social and ecological calamities on par with those at earlier dams. But there was one principal difference that made Balbina exceptional: timing. Balbina came on the heels of a spate of other controversial dam projects that had turned many Brazilians against big dams. Furthermore, the military regime stepped down in 1985, during construction, and the civilian government that replaced it finished the dam. The return to civilian rule emboldened dam critics to pressure the government for more effective safeguards, and though the civilian government did not suspend the project, it did implement better belated remediation programs than the military regime had done for its reservoirs. Balbina was thus the last of its kind and became a watershed moment in the history of Brazilian dams.

Published during the debates around the role of the author in response to the Cuban Revolution, at the height of the Latin American literary Boom, Todos los fuegos el fuego (1966) emerges not only as a culmination of Julio Cortázar’s short fiction but also as a volume in dialogue with the literary, social, and political concerns of the time. Constant throughout this collection is the representation of characters who are displaced from familiar surroundings either physically, psychologically, or even fantastically. Characters are forced to share an uncomfortable space in “Autopista del Sur,” a story situated on the highway south of Paris that presents an allegory of human relations. Through the textual transposition of Che Guevara’s diaristic rendition of his trajectory through the Sierra Maestra Mountains in Cuba, “Reunión” also records the historical meeting of revolutionaries. Meanings produced through displacements develop also in the closing story of the volume, “El otro cielo,” in which Paris and Buenos Aires are seamlessly intertwined in the character’s experience. Displacement functions as an organizing thread through Todos los fuegos el fuego; transfers and reverberations in the stories generate disquieting tensions that reflect contemporary sociopolitical realities and the human condition.

This is a chapter about the desire to escape, to flee, to desert the Argentineity of Argentine literature; about a force bent on undermining or abandoning Spanish, on imagining literary projects placed beyond, underneath, or against the institutionalized understanding of a national tradition based on long-held beliefs in sovereign forms of language, territoriality, and identity. It focuses on a discursive force lurking behind a list of proper names – J.Rodolfo Wilcock, Copi, Sylvia Molloy, Edgardo Cozarinsky, María Negroni – rendered visible by a shared will to displace the boundaries of the Argentine tradition as a cultural site that lends itself to processes of subjectivation and misidentification. The textual moments and stances analyzed inscribe displaced writerly practices (always marked by ambivalences and unresolved tensions) in a designated, reimagined foreign space, at once strange and familiar – be that a specific cultural and linguistic location in the Global North (Rome, Paris, New York) or an indeterminate site marked by indexical signs of elsewhereness.