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CALL FOR PAPERS
Imperialism, Slavery, Race, and Genocide: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) first argued that there were continuities between the
age of European imperialism and the age of fascism in Europe in her great work
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). She claimed that theories of race,
notions of racial and cultural superiority, and the right for ‘superior races’
to expand territorially were themes that connected the white settler colonies,
the other imperial possessions, and the fascist ideologies of post-Great War
Europe.
These claims have rarely been taken up by historians. Only in recent years has
the work of scholars such as J*rgen Zimmerer and A. Dirk Moses begun to show in
some detail that Arendt was correct. Zimmerer has convincingly shown that there
are many continuities – of ideology and practice – between the
German-perpetrated genocide of the Hereros in German South West Africa in
1904-1905 and the Holocaust. Moses argues that on many levels there are
meaningful comparisons to be drawn between the Holocaust and the earlier
genocide of Australian Aborigines. In other words, the current thrust of
comparative genocide scholarship is to show that ‘Holocaust’ is not a separate
category from ‘genocide’ but that the Holocaust is an extreme variant of
genocide. There are, this scholarship indicates, many aspects of the Holocaust
that are akin to earlier colonial genocides or genocidal massacres, indeed it
is unlikely that the Holocaust could have taken place without the precedent of
colonial massacres.
It is noteworthy that much contemporary genocide scholarship focuses on the
Holocaust as its point of comparison. For it was the Holocaust – though not yet
known by that name – that drove Arendt to undertake her research, much in the
same vein as Rapha*l Lemkin, the ‘father’ of the UN Genocide Convention (1948),
whose work was largely inspired by the experience of the Jews during World War
II. After several decades of intensive research on the Holocaust in isolation,
the wheel has now turned full circle, and a broader framework – one initially
formulated by Arendt – is now being proposed.
Yet Arendt’s work was based not only the study of genocide. Instead, in order to
understand what had transpired in Europe under Nazi rule she turned to the
interrelated histories of European imperialist expansion and racism. These
aspects of her work have been neglected, especially in the tradition of
political theory that constitutes the dominant trend in the secondary
literature on Arendt. Similarly, although her later essay on the Little Rock
crisis caused a stir when it was published, commentators have usually treated
it in isolation from the rest of her corpus, or have explained Arendt’s
idiosyncratic position in terms of her philosophical terminology concerning the
separation of the private and the political spheres. Yet, taken together, these
works, and her other writings from the most famous such as Eichmann in
Jerusalem to her less well-known essays that are only now being collected and
published, constitute a major set of statements on imperialism, race, and
genocide that have not been collated and worked through.
That is not to say that there is a shortage of literature on Arendt and the
Holocaust, or on Arendt and totalitarianism. This literature is just as large
as the more strictly political theory approach that discusses Arendt and
liberalism, or Arendt and political action, or the philosophical literature
that treats Arendt’s relationship to other great thinkers from Augustine to
Heidegger, or considers her theories of thinking or justice. But Arendt’s
insights into the interconnectedness of imperialism, race and genocide have
been as yet only dimly perceived, and urgently require elaboration. This
collection does not seek merely to expound Arendt’s opinions on these subjects;
rather, it seeks to use her insights as the jumping-off point for further
investigations – including ones critical of Arendt – into the ways in which
race, imperialism, slavery and genocide are linked, and the ways in which these
terms have affected the United States, Europe, and the colonised world in
different ways. What we propose is thus not another set of essays seeking to
explicate Arendt’s thought, but rather an experiment in intellectual history
that uses Arendtian terms and concepts to explain the racialization of the
‘enlightened’ west and the many different ways in which that dominance of race
has been expressed: through slavery and subsequently segregation; through
imperialism and the domination over ‘backward races’; through the academic
traditions of ethnology, anthropology and race-thinking; and through genocide,
the elimination of the ‘undesirable’. There is a line running through these
phenomena that Arendt perceived and began to bring to light; in this book we
seek to make it plainly visible.
Send proposals of 500-1000 words by 30 September 2004 to Richard H. King
([log in to unmask]) and Dan Stone ([log in to unmask]).
Dr Robert Eaglestone
Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature,
Editor, Routledge Critical Thinkers,
Department of English
Royal Holloway, University of London
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