The Conditions of ‘Savages’? the racist discourse she is trying to understand. According to this interpretation, Arendt sees race and the categories of ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ exclusively as the products of European racism. Indeed, as George Kateb points out, if [Arendt] can imagine [the Boers’] feelings when they first saw the blacks, she is also unremitting in describing the Boers’ cruelty and their own degeneration into a merely natural, though completely exploitative existence. 47 However, this interpretation hits its limits precisely in the passages where Arendt compares stateless people and refugees to ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’. For comparing the rightlessness of stateless people and refugees in Europe to the rightlessness of Africans in no way clarifies the predicament of the former. On the contrary, it raises the big question how the ways in which European nation-states produce the rightlessness of stateless people and refugees relate to the ways in which they produce — and used to produce — the rightlessness of Africans by means of racism; in other words, how the political production of stateless people and refugees relates to the political production of race. Arendt does not address this question. IV ‘A PECULIAR STATE OF NATURE’ Let’s return to ch 9. The term ‘savages’ reappears three pages before the end of the chapter: The survivors of the extermination camps, the inmates of concentration and internment camps, and even the comparatively happy stateless people could see without Burke’s arguments that the abstract nakedness of being nothing but human was their greatest danger. Because of it they were regarded as savages and, afraid that they might end by being considered beasts, they insisted on their nationality, the last sign of their former citizenship, as their only remaining and recognized tie with humanity. Their distrust of natural, their preference for national, rights comes precisely from their realization that natural rights are granted even to savages. … If the tragedy of savage tribes is that they inhabit an unchanged nature which they cannot master, yet upon whose abundance or frugality they depend for their livelihood, that they live and die without leaving any trace, without having contributed anything to a common world, then these rightless people are indeed thrown back into a peculiar state of nature. 48 Political theorist Ayten Gündoğdu discusses this passage in her 2015 book, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants, which is a notable exception to the lack of attention to Arendt’s ‘controversial analogy’ between rightless people and ‘savage tribes’. 49 Gündoğdu writes: 47 48 49 Kateb (n 4) 63 (emphasis added). Cf Benhabib’s refutation of Anne Norton’s critique of Arendt: [w]hy indeed did Arendt try to analyze the mind of the Boer and leave ‘the African silent’? The answer simply is that Arendt analyzed the ‘scramble for Africa’ from the standpoint of its influence upon the perversion of European morals, manners, and customs; she was concerned to explore how the experience of lawlessness, of civilizational regression, the threat to identity posed by otherness, all return back home from the ‘Dark Continent’ to create the heart of darkness within Europe itself. Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt (n 4) 85–86. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 1) 300. Ayten Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Hannah Arendt and the Contemporary Struggles of Migrants (Oxford University Press 2015). 203