2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(2) separately, titled ‘Imperialism’), in which ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ figure prominently and in which the concept of race plays a central role. 2 But this lack of attention to Arendt’s comparison is also surprising given the central role that race often plays in policies and discourses about stateless people and refugees. 3 Although Arendt’s writings on race have been the topic of a heated debate in Arendt scholarship since the 1990s, Arendt scholars have seldomly connected this debate to Arendt’s analysis of statelessness. 4 The purpose of this article is not to either ‘defend’ or ‘condemn’ Arendt for her writings on race, let alone to question her ‘private ethics’. 5 Instead, this article seeks to explore the ways in which race enters — as well as the ways in which race does not enter — our analyses of statelessness when we build those analyses 2 3 4 5 See ibid pt 2 ch 5–9. Various scholars have recently pointed out that the role of race in policies and discourses about refugees remains underexplored in the field of migration studies. Cf Alana Lentin, Darshan Vigneswaran, Saskia Bonjour and Amade M’Charek, ‘What’s the Use of Race in Migration Studies’ (Workshop, University of Amsterdam, 1 October 2018). Romit Bhandari also commented on the lack of attention to race in the study of refugee law in his presentation: ‘International Refugee Law’s Cyclical Dialectics: Between Universality and Eurocentrism’ (Presentation, 2018 Critical Legal Conference, Open University, 6 September 2018). However, several scholars gave presentations on the connections between refugee law, refugee policing, and race at a conference on ‘Racial Orders, Racist Borders’ organised by the Amsterdam Centre for Globalisation Studies on 17–18 October 2019. An early, polemical intervention in this debate was Anne Norton’s 1995 article: ‘Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt’ in Bonnie Honig (ed) Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (Pennsylvania State University Press 1995), 247. Taking issue with what she called the ‘generous’ interpretations of Arendt’s treatment of European racism in The Origins of Totalitarianism by George Kateb, Lisa Dish and Seyla Benhabib (‘Arendt’s defenders’), Norton argued that there is in fact an ‘uneasy fit between [Arendt’s] writings on race and her disavowal of complicity in an unjust racial order’, and that her constructions of Africans and African Americans, her forgetfulness of Asians, and her efforts to sequester racism in the South do not subvert or depart from what she called ‘the common prejudices of Americans in this area’. At 248. See also George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Rowman and Allanheld 1983) 61–63. For Benhabib’s response to Norton, see Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (Rowman & Littlefield 2003) 86. The debate about Arendt’s writings on race continues to this day. See, for instance, the volume, Richard H King and Dan Stone (eds), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (Berghahn 2007); Michael Rothberg, ‘At the Limits of Eurocentrism: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism’ in Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (Stanford University Press 2009); Jimmy Casas Klausen, ‘Hannah Arendt’s Antiprimitivism’ (2010) 38(3) Political Theory 394; Kathryn T Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press 2014). See especially Shmuel Lederman, ‘Making the Desert Bloom: Hannah Arendt and Zionist Discourse’ (2016) 21(4) The European Legacy 393, which discusses Arendt’s early justification of Zionism through the colonialist trope of cultivating the land. These issues are at the centre of some of the polemics about Arendt’s writings on race. For instance, Norton writes: I am concerned not with Arendt’s private ethics, but with the racial politics expressed in a body of canonical writings, and the strategies of denial that haunt the politics of race in America. Yet this essay may call Arendt’s private ethics into question. I regret that, but I find the reasons for writing outweigh the reasons for silence. Norton (n 4) 248. The primary concern of Norton’s article is the ‘unjust effects’ of ‘Arendt’s statements on Africans and African Americans’, for instance ‘when we place Arendt’s writings on race before our students and our readers, without question or remark, in an attitude of respect and veneration’: at 248. 196