This article examines Hannah Arendt’s concern for remembrance in political life in light of contemporary discourses regarding the memory of slavery and colonization in the African diaspora. Arendt’s blindness to questions of exclusion within this context has given way to a set of critical debates in Arendt studies concerning the viability of her political project. In this paper, I give further contour to these debates by considering Arendt’s discourse on revolution in light of an analysis of the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). In so doing, my aim is to deepen and challenge Arendt’s understanding of the revolutionary tradition that she believes we are responsible for remembering and appropriating anew in political life today.
ArendtHannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1973.
2.
ArendtHannah. The Life of the Mind. New York: Harcourt, Inc. 1978.
3.
ArendtHannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
4.
ArendtHannah. Between Past and Future. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
5.
ArendtHannah. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 2006.
6.
ArendtHannah. “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition.” In The Jewish Writings, edited by KohnJeromeFeldmanRon H., 275–97. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.
7.
ArendtHannah. “Walter Benjamin: 1892–1940.” In Illuminations, edited by BenjaminWalter, 1–49. New York: Shocken Books, 2007.
8.
BarashJeffery Andrew. “Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Remembrance.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies10, no. 2 (2002): 171–82.
9.
BerkowitzRoger. “Reconciling Oneself to the Impossibility of Reconciliation.” In Artifacts of Thinking: Reading Arendt’s Denktagebuch, edited by BerkowitzRogerStoreyIan, 9–36. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
10.
BernasconiRobert, “The Double Face of the Political and the Social: Hannah Arendt and America’s Racial Divisions.” Research in Phenomenology26, no. 1 (1996): 3–24.
11.
Buck-MorssSusan. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
12.
CassinBarbara. Nostalgia: When Are We Ever at Home. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
13.
CésaireAmié. Toussaint-Louverture, la Revolution Française et le Probleme Colonial. Paris: Présence Africaine, 2000.
14.
Dana Villa, Arendt, Heidegger, and the Tradition, Social Research: An International Quarterly74, no. 4 (2007): 983–1002, 985.
15.
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, August 26, 1789. For the English translation, see, Colin Jones, The Longman Companion to the French Revolution (New York: Longman Inc., 1988), 65.
16.
DuboisLaurent. Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean. Raleigh: UNC Press, 2004.
17.
Dubois. Avengers of the New World, 277.
18.
DuboisLaurent. Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009.
19.
DuboisLaurentGarrigusJohn, ed. Slave Revolution in the Caribbean: A Brief History With Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006.
20.
FickCarolyn E. The Making of Haiti: The Saint-Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990.
21.
FischerSybille. Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
22.
GhachemMalick W. The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
23.
GinesKathryn T. “Race Thinking and Racism in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, edited by KingRichardStoneDan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007.
24.
GinesKathryn T. Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
25.
GlissantÉdouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays. Translated by DashMichael. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1989.
26.
HannahArendt. “Reflections on Little Rock.” Dissent6 (1959): 45–56.
27.
HeideggerMartin. Being and Time. Translated by StambaughJoan, edited by SchmidtDennis J. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010, 366–367.
28.
JamesCLR. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Random House, 1963.
29.
Jean-Jacques, Dessalines. “1804 Haitian Declaration of Independence,” Slave Revolution in the Caribbean: A Brief History With Documents 1789-1804, Translated by DuboisLaurentGarrigusJohn (New York, Bedford/St. Martin's, 2006), 188.
30.
KingRichard. “Introduction.” In Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, edited by KingRichardStoneDan (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 3.
31.
KingRichard. “Hannah Arendt and the Concept of Revolution.” New Formations71, no. 03 (2011): 30–45.
32.
McMullinIrene. “The Amnesia of the Modern: Arendt on the Role of Memory in the Constitution of the Political.” Philosophical Topics39, no. 2 (Fall2011): 91–16.
33.
NesbittNick. Universal Emancipation. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2008.
34.
NietzscheFriedrich. The Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life. Indianapolis: Hacket Publishing Company, 1980.
35.
Price-MarsJean. So Spoke the Uncle. Translated by ShannonMagdalene W.. Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1983.
36.
ScottDavid. Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.
37.
ShirazDossa. “Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust.” The Canadian Journal of Political Science13, no. 2 (1980): 309–323.
38.
Simeon-JonesKersuze. Literary and Sociopolitical Writings of the Black Diaspora in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Lexington Books, 2010.
39.
TaminiauxJacques. “Athens and Rome.” In The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt, edited by VillaDana. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 165–177.
40.
TrouillotMichel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995.
41.
TrouillotMichel-Rolph. “An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-Event.” In Haitian History: New Perspectives, edited by SepinwallAlyssa Goldstein, 33–54. New York: Routledge, 2013.
42.
VillaDana. “Arendt, Heidegger, and the Tradition.” Social Research: An International Quarterly74, no. 4 (2007): 983–02.
