‘Causes’ versus ‘Conditions’: Imperial Sovereignty, Postcolonial Violence and the recent Re-Emergence of Arendtian Political Thought in African Studies

ABSTRACT

Since the Rwandan genocide of 1994, an increase in scholarship on genocide and mass violence has developed over the past ten years, an interdisciplinary effort that has initiated a search for both a ‘usable past’ and at times a useful ‘theoretical past’. Against this backdrop, this article is concerned with the provisional re-emergence of Hannah Arendt's thought in African studies. It aims to explore the main facets of this under-recognised legacy to claim a contemporary place for her within the history of political thought on Africa and imperialism more generally. Divided into two parts, this essay first provides a summary of Arendt's engagement with imperial conditions in Africa, as found in her first major work The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). Her influence is then traced in recent studies on South Africa and Rwanda, though not without critique. The insights and limitations of her interpretations rest on a distinction between ‘causes’ versus ‘conditions’, with her emphasis on the latter circumscribing the effectiveness of her analysis. Distinguishing such points of view is a key lesson to be drawn from her work, offering further means for understanding and assessing the contours of contemporary scholarship. This essay concludes that her ideas have prefigured current debates and deserve renewed recognition.

Keywords:

• bureaucracy
• Hannah Arendt
• postcolonial studies
• race
• state violence

I am grateful to Philip Zachernuk, Andreas Eckert, and Donald S. Moore for comments and encouragement on previous versions of this essay. This article has also benefited from the keen insights of the anonymous peer-review readers for this journal; I would particularly like to thank the reviewer whose insight that totalitarianism is fundamentally anti-state I have incorporated into this article. I would also like to thank the Izaak Walton Killam Trust and the Department of History at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, for financial support while writing this essay.

I am grateful to Philip Zachernuk, Andreas Eckert, and Donald S. Moore for comments and encouragement on previous versions of this essay. This article has also benefited from the keen insights of the anonymous peer-review readers for this journal; I would particularly like to thank the reviewer whose insight that totalitarianism is fundamentally anti-state I have incorporated into this article. I would also like to thank the Izaak Walton Killam Trust and the Department of History at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, for financial support while writing this essay.

Notes

I am grateful to Philip Zachernuk, Andreas Eckert, and Donald S. Moore for comments and encouragement on previous versions of this essay. This article has also benefited from the keen insights of the anonymous peer-review readers for this journal; I would particularly like to thank the reviewer whose insight that totalitarianism is fundamentally anti-state I have incorporated into this article. I would also like to thank the Izaak Walton Killam Trust and the Department of History at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, for financial support while writing this essay.