Going public: Hannah Arendt, immigrant action, and the space of appearance

Political Theory

Volumn 37, Issue 5, 2009, Pages 595-622

  Beltrán, Cristina ^a  

^a HAVERFORD COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

Arendt; Freedom; Immigration; Labor; Latinos

Indexed keywords

EID: 70349974640     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: 15527476     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591709340134     Document Type: Article

References (119)

1. William V. Flores, Undocumented Immigrants and Latino Cultural Citizenship, in Latino Cultural Citizenship: Claiming Identity, Space, and Rights, ed. William V. Flores and Rina Benmayor (Boston: Beacon, 1997), 255-77.
2. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 206.
3. The initial trigger for the protests was the U.S. House of Representatives's December 2005 passage of H.R. 4437 (the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005). The bill contained harsh provisions: it declared that simply being undocumented constituted a felony and criminalized anyone who offered nonemergency assistance to undocumented workers and their families.
4. As Alfonso Gonzales has argued, the success of the 2006 marches can be traced to the nuclei of leadership developed during the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 70s. For Gonzales, it was the Chicano struggle for self-determination that set the ideological groundwork and organizational infrastructure crucial to defeating H.R. 4437. See Alfonso Gonzales, The 2006 Mega-Marchas in Greater Los Angeles: Counter-hegemonic Moment and the Future of El Migrante Struggle, Latino Studies, Vol. 7, 1, 30-59.
5. Moreover, as Ruth Milkman has noted, a number of factors led to the massive outpouring of activism manifested in spring 2006. Labor unions clearly played a key role, as did the Catholic Church, immigrant home-town associations, student organizations, and Spanish-language media.
6. See Milkman, Critical Mass: Latino Labor and Politics in California, North American Congress on Latin America 40, no. 3 (May/June 2007): 30-31.
7. and Reuters, Powerful Latino DJs to Mount Immigrant Voter Drive, July 7, 2006.
8. Ted Wang and Robert C. Winn, Groundswell Meets Groundwork: Preliminary Recommendations for Building on Immigrant Mobilizations (New York: Four Freedoms Fund, 2006), 6.
9. In analyzing the immigrant-rights protests, it's clear that the demonstrations involved a large number of non-Latino populations from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond. While I don't want to replicate the mass media's erasure of these populations from the protests, my research focus is on Latino immigrants (with a particular focus on the undocumented). In doing this, my research draws on the insights of Mae Ngai and Nicholas de Genova, who note that in the United States, the social condition of illegality has often rendered "Mexican" the distinctive national/racialized name for such undocumented subjectivity. Like Ngai and de Genova, my research seeks to engage this particular racialization of the undocumented. See Ngai's Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
10. and de Genova's Migrant 'Illegality' and Deportability in Everyday Life, Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 419-47.
11. For some of the marches' more xenophobic critics, the protests were further proof of a burgeoning anti-American secessionist movement wherein Chicano nationalists and other Latino radicals seek to reconquer the American Southwest. See Patrick J. Buchanan, State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2006).
12. and The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization (New York: St. Martin's, 2002).
13. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 66-67, 88.
14. See Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 99.
15. For a discussion of these issues, see Mary Dietz's essay Feminist Receptions of Hannah Arendt, in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, ed. Bonnie Honig (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995).
16. Among Arendt's critics on this point, see especially Sheldon S. Wolin, Hannah Arendt: Democracy and the Political, Salmagundi 60 (Summer 1983).
17. Seyla Benhabib, The Reluctant Modernism of Hannah Arendt, new ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).
18. Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt's Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
19. and Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought, new ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
20. Mark Reinhardt, The Art of Being Free: Taking Liberties with Tocqueville, Marx, and Arendt (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 146.
21. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1963), 94.
22. As Linda Zerilli has noted, Arendt's tendency to define all issues related to the body as dangerous forms of necessity that are best kept private if not hidden has made her a controversial figure on the progressive Left and in contemporary feminism. See Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3.
23. See Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 61.
24. Seyla Benhabib, Kantian Questions, Arendtian Answers: Statelessness, Cosmopolitanism, and the Right to Have Rights, in Pragmatism, Critique, Judgment: Essays for Richard J. Bernstein, ed. Benhabib and Nancy Fraser (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 173.
25. Also see Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? Language, Politics, Belonging (New York: Seagull, 2007), 27.
26. Richard J. Bernstein, Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind? From Radical Evil to the Banality of Evil, in Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later, ed. Larry May and Jerome Kohn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 127.
27. Warner, Public and Counterpublics, 61.
28. See Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents and Citizens (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
29. and Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State?
30. Bhikhu Parekh, Hannah Arendt's Critique of Marx, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery of the Public World, ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin's, 1979), 85-87.
31. Bonnie Honig's suggestion that taking may be the very thing that immigrants have to give us challenges the more consensual notion of citizenship common among democratic theorists. Michael Walzer, for example, approaches membership as a social good that members distribute and give out to strangers. He writes, Membership as a social good is constituted by our understanding; its value is fixed by our work and conversation; and then we are in charge (who else could be in charge?) of its distribution. But we don't distribute it among ourselves; it is already ours. We give it out to strangers. Hence the choice is also governed by our relationships with strangers.
32. Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 32.
33. Walzer's treatment of membership as a good that is possessed reflects a logic invested in the idea of intentional and deliberate distribution. Yet as Charles T. Lee has argued, this seemingly democratic notion of consensual citizenship fortifies rather than loosens the binary distinction of citizens and outsiders. See Lee, Tactical Citizenship: Domestic Workers, the Remainders of Home, and Undocumented Citizen Participation in the Third Space of Mimicry, Theory & Event 9, no. 3 (2006).
34. By privileging the idea of mutuality, Walzer is less able to account for the more contentious practices involved in gaining political membership. As Honig notes, practices of taking are always viewed as illegitimate from the perspective of the current governing order. Moreover, membership is itself a precarious concept, particularly when considering the dynamics of race and citizenship. Latinos have often found themselves in a stigmatized and subordinate position, regardless of citizenship status. From the deportations of U.S.-born Mexicans during the mass repatriation of Mexican immigrants in the 1930s to the anti-Latino rhetoric of backers of Proposition 187 in California, the civic history of Latinos has shown that being a citizen guarantees neither full membership in society nor equal rights. See Flores, Undocumented Immigrants, 225. In other words, Walzer's claim that membership is already ours is complicated by conditions of inequality and racial difference. Despite the fact that Walzer is sympathetic to the rights of noncitizens and promotes their naturalization, his language of mutual consent is unable to account for contested notions of membership and racialized political action.
35. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, CA: Harcourt, 1951/ 1994), 267.
36. Arendt, The Human Condition, 246.
37. Hannah Arendt, What Is Freedom? in Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York: Penguin, 1954/ 2006), 151.
38. Arendt, The Human Condition, 8.
39. Ibid., 176.
40. Ibid., 197.
41. Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss of Freedom, 20.
42. Arendt, The Human Condition, 178-79.
43. Bickford, In the Presence of Others: Arendt and Anzaldúa on the Paradox of Public Appearance, in Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt, 315.
44. Wang and Winn, Groundswell Meets Groundwork, 2, 5-6.
45. Arendt, What Is Freedom? 169.
46. Wang and Winn, Groundswell Meets Groundwork, 6.
47. See http://nylatinojournal.com/home/politics/americas/a_multitude_in_chicago_for_ immigrant_rights.html.
48. Arendt, The Human Condition, 197.
49. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 287.
50. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, ed. J. C. D. Clark (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001).
51. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 300.
52. Benhabib, Kantian Questions, Arendtian Answers, 192.
53. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 286.
54. Ibid., 295-96.
55. Ibid., 297, 300-1.
56. Ibid., 296.
57. As Richard Bernstein notes in his discussion of Arendt and her reading of the concentration and extermination camps, to make human beings superfluous is to eradicate the very conditions that make humanity possible-to destroy human plurality, spontaneity, natality, and individuality. See Bernstein, Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind? 135.
58. For more on the immigrant that seeks to renationalize the state, see chapter 4 in Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (The Myth of Immigrant America).
59. Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 117.
60. Ibid., 3, 118
61. In Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? Ranciére takes issue with what he describes as Arendt's rigid opposition between the realm of the political and the realm of private life in The Origins of Totalitarianism. For Ranciére, Arendt's position depoliticizes matters of power and repression, setting them in an anthropological sphere of sacrality beyond the reach of political dissensus. Intriguingly, in his analysis of Homo Sacer, Ranciére notes that while Agamben's view of the camp as the nomos for modernity may seem quite removed from Arendt's view of political action, in fact the radical suspension of politics in the exception of bare life is the ultimate consequence of Arendt's archipolitical position, of her attempt to preserve the political from the contamination of private, social, apolitical life. See Jacques Ranciére, Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 299, 301.
62. In his reading of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Giorgio Agamben's depiction of the biopolitical nature of sovereign power goes far beyond Arendt in producing a fatalistic and rectilinear account of history. For an excellent account of Agamben's theory of history, his representation of time, and its relationship to sovereignty in Homo Sacer, see Andreas Kalyvas, The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp, in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer, ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 107-34.
63. Ranciére, Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? 304.
64. Rachel L. Swarns, Immigrants Rally in Scores of Cities for Legal Status, New York Times, April 11, 2006.
65. Bill Hackwell, Largest Demonstration in California History, San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center, March 26, 2006, www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/03/26/18111081.php.
66. Arendt, On Revolution, 119.
67. Ibid., 69.
68. Hannah Fenichel Pitkin, Justice: On Relating Private and Public, Political Theory 9, no. 3 (1981): 332.
69. Arendt, The Human Condition, 186.
70. Arendt, On Revolution, 119.
71. Swarns, Immigrants Rally in Scores of Cities for Legal Status.
72. Russ Rymer, Mañana Votamos (editor's note), Mother Jones, July/August 2006.
73. I should note that such efforts at purging the demonstrations of any negative display of emotion were also a way to avoid any negative consequences from the protests. Aware of the risks immigrants were taking in claiming the public realm, many liberal advocates encouraged protesters to display proper forms of patriotism alongside cultural displays that emphasized family, tradition, and festiveness. By deemphasizing the marches' radical and agonistic quality, activists sought to protect protesters from the violent power of the state.
74. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner, 8.
75. Bickford, In the Presence of Others, 316.
76. Ibid., 318.
77. Ibid., 317.
78. Ibid., 320.
79. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962).
80. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 62, 65.
81. Ibid., 56.
82. Samuel A. Chambers, Democracy and (the) Public(s): Spatializing Politics in the Internet Age, Political Theory 33, no. 1 (2005): 131.
83. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 75, 119.
84. Ibid., 118, 113.
85. Also see Nancy Fraser's Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy, in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
86. Flores, Undocumented Immigrants, 276, 273.
87. Ibid., 263.
88. See Pamela Constable, Latinos Unite to Turn Fear into Activism, Washington Post, July 28, 2007.
89. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 63.
90. Ibid., 57-58.
91. Ibid., 62.
92. Spanish 'Banner' Draws Protest, USA Today, April 29, 2006.
93. John Holusha, Bush Says Anthem Should Be in English, New York Times, April 28, 2006.
94. Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation State? 60.
95. See Parekh, Hannah Arendt's Critique of Marx, 77.
96. Martin Levin, On Animal Laborans and Homo Politicus in Hannah Arendt: A Note, Political Theory 7, no. 4 (1979): 525.
97. Ibid., 523.
98. Arendt, The Human Condition, 87.
99. Ibid., 101.
100. Melissa W. Wright, Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2.
101. Ibid., 73, 88.
102. Ibid., 78, 88.
103. Ibid., 151.
104. For a discussion of the concept of death by culture, see Uma Narayan, Cross-Cultural Connections, Border-Crossings, and 'Death by Culture,' in Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third World Feminism (New York: Routledge, 1997).
105. Nicholas de Genova, The Legal Production of Mexican/Migrant 'Illegality, Latino Studies 2, no. 2 (2004): 179.
106. Otto Santa Ana, Brown Tide Rising: Metaphors of Latinos in Contemporary American Public Discourse (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002).
107. Bernstein, Did Hannah Arendt Change Her Mind? 132.
108. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 63.
109. Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), 68.
110. Ibid., 79.
111. Benjamin R. Barber, Review of American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion, by Judith N. Shklar, Political Theory 21, no. 1 (February 1993): 146-53.
112. Remarks by the President on Comprehensive Immigration Reform, August 3, 2006.
113. Peter Suderman, Rove's Quotes, from The Corner, National Review Online, February 12, 2007, http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjM3MWI2ZjdkODhiODc5NTc5Y2M0OGR iMzc1YTIwNGI=.
114. See David Kirkpatrick, Demonstrations on Immigration Are Hardening Divide, New York Times, April 17, 2006.
115. In Who Sings the Nation State? Judith Butler alludes to this tension by contrasting the singing of the national anthem in Spanish with invocations of one's capacity to labor. She writes, Some people chose that anthem as a way to go; there are other people who chose very different ways to go. The discourse of equality or the discourse of labor-we are the labor you need, we are the labor you rely on, watch what happens to your stores when we don't go to work; we are part of the system of production and circulation and distribution and your economy is not functioning without us and that gives us a certain kind of power. . . We are the invisible disenfranchised underpaid labor that allows your economy to work. . . That strikes me as very different from the national anthem moment and it may well be a different kind of we as well.
116. Butler and Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? 113.
117. Arendt, The Human Condition, 206.
118. Ranciére, Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man? 302.
119. Ibid., 348.