When the Nation Conquered the State: Arendt’s Importance Today
Abstract
This essay focuses on the contemporary relevance of Hannah Arendt’s work insofar as it relates to US racism, imperialism, and migration. While Arendt denied that US migration policy and racism were linked or even similar to exercises of racialized sovereignty, totalitarian tactics, and mass displacement in Europe, I suggest that her analyses help us to understand important racialized dialectics between prison and camp, citizen and stateless, and external displacement and internal displacement. In effect, this essay suggests that many of Arendt’s analyses of racism, migration, and camps are more relevant to US history and contemporary US reality than she did or would have admitted. Arendt’s work importantly suggested that the stateless were so rightless that they lacked even criminal rights. In many respects, the criminal-stateless binary accurately illustrates the rightlessness of refugees in contrast to the rights of US citizen-criminals. However, she partly fails to recognize how the dialectical opposition between foreigner and citizen-criminal could lead to less visible forms of overlap and convergence. Arendt’s binary also indicates an adherence to crypto-normativity, despite her professed antifoundational approach to political issues. Together, her theoretical strengths and certain failures illuminate our own (mis)understandings of a set of complex circumstances experienced today.
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Biographies
Kathleen R. Arnold is a political theorist who writes on issues of statelessness, poverty, and displacement. She is the author of five books, the most recent of which is Arendt, Agamben, and the Issue of Hyper-Legality (Routledge 2018) and is the Director of the Refugee and Forced Migration Program at DePaul University in Chicago, Illinois.
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Article first published online: August 25, 2022
Issue published: April 2023
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