RESISTING ERASURE: THE POLITICS OF RECKONING WITH STATELESSNESS IN THE ARTS NICOLETTA ENRIA ∗ TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction........................................................................................................... 315 Redefining Statelessness: ‘Home’ ........................................................................ 317 Universality of Experience ................................................................................... 321 Colonial Legacies ................................................................................................. 324 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 328 INTRODUCTION After this I disappeared… But I didn’t die. Isn’t there a lesson in this? — Alien Land, Mo’min Swaitat 1 This quote from Alien Land, a play by one of my interlocutors, Mo’min Swaitat, a Bedouin actor from Palestine, captures how stateless people often slip through the cracks and remain invisible. Statelessness is the condition of individuals, populations or spaces that are not legally bound to a state. Here, I focus on stateless populations, namely those who are ‘recognised as belonging to an entity and/or ethnicity which has no state’. 2 The popular and policy discourse on statelessness remains dominated by legal-bureaucratic jargon, codifying stateless people as defined by negatives. 3 Not only does this make the discourse inaccessible to a large portion of the affected populations, the disempowering traits of defining statelessness as a ‘curse’ that must be eradicated discourages stateless actors from ∗ 1 2 3 Nicoletta Enria conducted this research as part of her postgraduate studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science’s European Institute. Her research focus and interests lie in European Union migration and asylum policy; statelessness; European, Middle Eastern and North African (‘MENA’) politics and fostering the arts for empathetic policymaking. She has a background in advocacy and policy in minority rights and EU–MENA and Euro–Mediterranean relations, and is currently working as an analyst in EU justice and home affairs. Mo'min Swaitat, Alien Land (Play Script, 2018), 14 (copy on hand with the author) (‘Alien Land’). Amal de Chickera and Laura van Waas, ‘Unpacking Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 54, 65. See, eg, Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September 1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960) art 1 (‘1954 Convention’): A stateless person is an individual ‘who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’.