Hannah Arendt Text Seminar Engages Scholars in Critical Dialogue about Race and Race Thinking

“One of the primary reasons why I wanted to come to the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network (HAHN) Annual Text Seminar is because the vernacular of race doesn’t exist so much in Bangladesh; it’s something we think of as a Western issue,” said Nooha Sabanta Maula, a lecturer at BRAC University and one of twelve OSUN scholars, students, and experts who gathered in Kingston, New York in June for close readings of writings on race by political theorist Hannah Arendt. 

In a short video documenting participants’ experience at the seminar, Maula said it was helpful to discuss writings on race by someone who had been racialized herself, as it provided an equalizing ground for sometimes difficult conversations. Arendt was German American and Jewish. “Rather than discussing race in an abstract manner, where I think it becomes difficult because it’s based on personal opinions, we had the texts to work with,” she said.

The seminar drew on Arendt’s early writings on Zionism and the "Jewish Question" in the late 1930s, her major work The Origins of Totalitarianism, and her commentary on the politics of race in the US in the 1960s. A crucial part of this year’s seminar was Arendt's controversial distinction between the notions of race-thinking, a formation of non-systematic prejudices and opinions, and racism, a full-fledged, organized system of bigoted belief. 

The seminar also compared Arendt with postcolonial thinkers such as Achille Mbembe, Sylvia Wynter, and Frantz Fanon, helping to inform broader debates on interracial coalition-building and the relationships between events such as the Holocaust and colonialism. The seminar furthered these debates by examining Arendt's texts through the lens of several writers’ postcolonial and race-based scholarship.

“The most helpful piece was being in conversation with other scholars from very different academic backgrounds and very different relationships to Arendt’s work,” said Mikos Zeldes-Roth, a doctoral candidate in political theory at the University of Toronto, who is applying Arendt’s political theory to the study of contemporary white nationalism in the United States. “It was the ability to hear people with their own research interests in and around the issues of race and racism connecting to Arendt’s treatment of those topics that felt unbelievably helpful for both my own research and also for my own learning,” he added. 

As Rémy-Paulin Twahirwa, a research student at the London School of Economics, put it, “Arendt showed the limits and also the danger of nationalism… especially in today’s world where we have a lot of calls to extreme nationalism coming back.”

Neil Roberts, professor of political theory, Black political thought, and Caribbean philosophy at the University of Toronto, explained that previous discussions of Arendt’s writings on race tend to divide the work between what she wrote while living in Europe and what she wrote after moving to the US as a refugee. Roberts said the Text Seminar instead sought to locate the commonalities between the two areas of writing. 

“As a scholar who works in critical race studies, to have a session on the theme of race, race thinking, and Arendt’s thought that cuts across several works…and then also discussions of Arendt’s interlocutors, that’s what distinguishes this particular form,” he said.  “I really hope that HAHN, in collaboration with OSUN and others, continues this because I think there’s a real value in having all of those different spheres of intellectual engagement.”

Watch the HAHN Text Seminar video here.
Learn more about HAHN here.
 

Post Date: 07-07-2023