This book is a study of statelessness in the period of the Second World War. It breaks new ground by focusing not on Europe, but on the Asian and Pacific theatres of the conflict. This perspective enables the volume to go beyond Hannah Arendt's classic account of statelessness in her Origins of Totalitarianism.
To Arendt, statelessness was the product of a failed system of European nation-states. Statelessness after Arendt finds a very different story when examining the history of stateless people, many of them Jews, coming to Asia from Europe to escape persecution. In the turbulent world of the 1930s and 1940s, being stateless in Harbin or Shanghai was not the same as being stateless in Hamburg or Vienna. In China and elsewhere in Asia, statelessness was not a uniform experience, but a variety of possibilities reflecting the political structure of the states and cities in which refugees found shelter.
The volume breaks new ground in showing how the stateless managed to enter the political realm long before they reached the threshold of citizenship. They developed a discourse of displacement through which they expressed their political identity as members of collectives, as people living together, joined in a common cause, at a time of terrible uncertainty. They spoke to each other in their own language, in newspapers, cafes, soup kitchens, theatres, sports clubs, schools and synagogues, and thereby took over the authorship of their own narratives. By doing so, they helped forge their pathway back to freedom.