Persistence in the Concentration Camp Form: Boochani’s Manus Island

Hannah Arendt’s thought in relation to the emergence of concentration camps in the twentieth century can be seminal for understanding the rightlessness of prospective migrants and asylum-seekers in the twenty-first. In this paper I seek to clearly delineate Arendt’s ‘concentration camp form’ and apply it to a near-contemporary case of mandatory immigration detention – one with loud echoes for an apparently growing number of ‘democratic’ and ‘autocratic’ nation states which are constructing a global concentrationary universe in which essentially innocent and rightless people are incarcerated and punished on a group basis rather than for criminal wrongdoing as traditionally understood. The case is the literary testimony of Behrouz Boochani in his 2018 book No Friend But the Mountains. Boochani’s is a powerful contemporary voice testifying about and critiquing the practice of mandatory immigration detention by liberal democracies. The paper attempts an intertextual reading of Boochani’s and Arendt’s writings.