In my recent article in Social History, vol. 47, issue 3 (2022), I argue that the quiet colonial violence of deportation was lived and procedural for socio-economically precarious migrants. There are multiple methods by which historians can ascertain and understand how this violence becomes embedded in the lives and livelihoods of migrants. One such method is a focus on the corporeal effects of colonialism upon migrants at the levels of the intimate and the personal. But how might social and postcolonial historians best explore the bureaucratic and procedural brutality of forced expulsions when, as Adam Goodman asserts, the practice of deportation in the early and mid-twentieth century deliberately left few documentary traces? [1] My own research on mobility and border controls during the Palestine Mandate (1920-1948) centres on documents written either by family members (namely, spouses or children) of deportees or by the deportees themselves with reference to family members. Using these sources, I extrapolate the ways that deportability and illegibility (or conversely, a migrant’s legibility to the state) structure the conditions that allow for the conduct of the intimate, personal, and emotional aspects of life.

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