Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2018) is the first major literary work to emerge from Australia’s offshore refugee detention regime in the Pacific. This essay examines Boochani’s landmark poetic-philosophical memoir for the way it exposes the systematic torture inside Manus Prison, Papua New Guinea. If, in the 1990s, the field of diaspora studies was reinvigorated by the apparently accelerated movement of people, money, and products, what purchase is a diasporic framework in the face of proliferating regimes of immobility? The chapter proceeds by thinking through three tropes common to diasporic narratives: first is the account of oppression that forces flight from the homeland; second are practical and ethical questions of hospitality/hostility, inclusion/exclusion, in the land of arrival; and third is the politics of collective identity in relation to the homeland. In short, how might we think of diaspora with its seeming opposite, detention?

Chapter 11 takes us to the edges of the Pacific archipelago for a closer look at the camps for Japanese Surrendered Personnel and the War Crimes Trials Compounds in the Australian-administered island territories of New Guinea. The chapter traces their changing accommodation in underground tunnels, timber barracks and Quonset huts. The War Criminals Prison at Manus Island precedes the later location there of the infamous offshore detention center, one of many such facilities later created for incarcerating unauthorized asylum seeker arrivals to Australia. The chapter makes the case for a genealogical approach to physical sites of incarceration as important for understanding the continuous historical entanglements of sovereignty and spatial forms of violence.