Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question

5 “A Preparatory Stage for the Coming Catastrophes”

5 “a Preparatory stage for the Coming Catastrophes” in 1945–1946 Hannah arendt began to formulate a proposal for a manuscript with the working title The Elements of Shame: Anti-Semitism—Imperialism—Racism.1 The text would be published with the title The Burden of Our Time (1951) in england , but most are familiar with the text as The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). arendt formulated the proposal for Origins a few years afer she fled southern France for the united states. Having been transferred from Paris to an internment camp in gurs, arendt and Heinrich Blücher made a narrow escape, which forced them to leave in 1941 for Lisbon and then new York without Martha arendt.2 i do not take lightly arendt’s situational knowledge about the rise of nazism and her integration of this knowledge into her understanding of the interrelationships between antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. it is also important to note the timing of the writing of Origins: not only in the afermath of totalitarianism but also in the face of anti-imperialism, or what is ofen described as decolonization. in her preface to the first edition of Origins (dated “summer 1950”), arendt writes, “antisemitism (not merely the hatred of the Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)—one afer the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity while its power must remain strictly limited, rooted and controlled by newly defined territorial entities” (OT ix). Young-Bruehl explains that, for arendt, the analysis in Origins is not historical writing insofar as such writing seeks to offer a justification; there is no justification for antisemitism, imperialism, and racism. But at the other end of the spectrum, the book was also not intended as a simple condemnation, which arendt thought could be taken as cynical and therefore unconvincing.3 i am interested in arendt’s Origins as one of her major political writings on the negro question—a question that arises throughout the text in her examination of imperialism, race thinking, and racism. in part 2 of Origins, arendt utilizes her usual method of distinction making by differentiating colonialism and imperialism along with race thinking and racism. But the systematic oppression that occurred during the “colonial” era in the americas had “imperialist” undertones , and the groundwork for race thinking and racism was laid long before what arendt considers to be the age of imperialism—between 1884 and 1914. in addi77 78 | Hannah arendt and the negro Question tion to the colonialism and imperialism distinction, there is also a relationship between imperialism and totalitarianism. While there are places where it seems arendt is offering a continuation argument concerning imperialism in africa and totalitarianism in europe, it is also the case that she emphasizes the uniqueness of nazism and the totalitarian Holocaust as altogether different from and more brutal than imperialism. i want to challenge a hierarchy-of-oppressions approach between imperialism and totalitarianism by taking seriously Michael rothberg’s use of multidirectionality as a conceptual model to imagine “how it is possible to remember the specificities of one history without silencing those of another.”4 despite the fact that arendt seeks to take a position against racism, there are still traces of racism in her analysis. This is marked in part by her frequent use of the term “savage” and by the way that she naturalizes africans, asserting that they are pure nature and suggesting that they are somehow not capable of culture and the formation of (or participation in) the political.5 Colonialism and imperialism in Origins arendt asserts that the difference between colonialism and imperialism has been neglected along with the distinctions between commonwealths and empires , plantations and possessions, and colonies and dependencies (OT 131). The differences between colonialism, or colonial trade, and imperialism that arendt emphasizes include the following: when she speaks of colonialism, she has in mind the european colonization of america and australia, and when she speaks of imperialism , she has in mind the expansion of european countries into africa and asia and the racism, exploitation, and violence that occurred there. For arendt, “colonialism” involved more of an extension of the laws and ideals of the mother country into the colonial territory, while “imperialism” ofen denied the extension of these laws, denied efforts to assimilate the foreign...