Hannah Arendt Center presents:
De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking
Neil Roberts to Keynote the 2025 Spring Conference on Hannah Arendt and Black Revolutionary Thought
Thursday, March 27, 2025
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
5:30 pm – 7:15 pm
This event occurred on:
Neil Roberts of Williams College will keynote on the topic of The Revolutionary Spirit: Hannah Arendt and Black Political Thought. Free and open to the public, the lecture will also be live streamed on the Arendt Center's YouTube channel.
Neil Roberts is associate dean of the faculty and the John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy professor of Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College. Roberts was President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016-19, and he served for several years on the Executive Editorial Board of the journal Political Theory. His publications include the books Creolizing Hannah Arendt (2024, with Marilyn Nissim-Sabat), A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (2018), the collaborative volume Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016), and the award-winning text Freedom as Marronage (2015) as well as numerous articles, book forewords (such as the 2024 foreword to Teodros Kiros's Zara Yacob's Inauguration of Modernity and Cardiocentrism), and chapters on creolizing the canon, Black radicalism, totalitarianism and modern politics, and the bounds of political theory. His work has appeared in periodicals such as Black Perspectives, Caribbean Studies, The C.L.R. James Journal, Contemporary Political Theory, HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Perspectives on Politics, Small Axe, and Theory & Event. How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism is his next monograph, and he's at work both on a study of Haile Selassie I and the Oxford Handbook of Sylvia Wynter.
The De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking series aims to promote and foster the legacy of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A partnership between the Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) at Bard College and De Gruyter publishing, the lecture will be delivered annually by a prominent scholar. De Gruyter explicitly intends for the lecture series to be open to a broad approach to Arendt across the disciplines of not only philosophy and political theory but the humanities and social sciences more generally. The Lecturer is selected by the HAC in consultation with previous Lecturers and De Gruyter.
Neil Roberts: De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking
Keynote Address, March 2025: “Of Strivings for the Revolutionary Spirit”
ABSTRACT:
[T]he effort to recapture the lost spirit of revolution must, to a certain extent, consist in the
attempt at thinking together”.
—Hannah Arendt (1963)
[P]olitical liberty was nothing if the liberty of the spirit was unattained. This was the
revolutionary intention”.
—Sylvia Wynter (1968/69)
Needless to say, we do more than just survive.”
—Walter Rodney (1969)
A conference on Hannah Arendt and Black political thought may be jarring, if not altogether improbable, for some persons to comprehend. Yet it very well might be needed now more than ever. This keynote address examines strivings for the revolutionary spirit and what such strivings
reveal about the contours of modern Black political thought and Arendt studies between past and future.
The 2025 De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking proceeds in four parts. First, it describes core claims from Neil Roberts’s collaborative book, Creolizing Hannah Arendt (2024), on the notion of creolization and the centrality of thinking—particularly the idea of
“creolizing thinking.” It discusses, in turn, the following key questions in Africana thought that help frame this endeavor: the identity question, the equality question, and the freedom question.
Second, the lecture defines what we mean respectively by “revolution” and “the revolutionary spirit.” Discerning the latter (both lost and recaptured) involves negotiating the conflicting strivings for lasting stability on the one hand and new beginnings, or natality, on the other hand. Careful attention to the landscape of intellectual traditions is also essential to critical assessments of these strivings. This facilitates the interpretation of experiences and ideas including enslavement, totalitarianism, prejudice, racism, violence, love, liberation, action, freedom, the human, and power, among other categories.
Third, the lecture pivots more narrowly towards the years 1968-1970 and the lives and work then of three intellectuals whom, when analyzed together, as often isn’t the case, illuminate strivings for and challenges to the revolutionary spirit: Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish émigré political theorist; Sylvia Wynter, the Jamaican novelist, philosopher, and cultural critical; and Walter Rodney, the Guyanese Pan-Africanist and historian of political thought.
The lecture’s final part is a reflection on creolizing Arendt, creolizing thinking, and the benefits and costs of revolution for Afromodern actors imbued with the revolutionary spirit.
Neil Roberts is associate dean of the faculty and the John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy professor of Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College. Roberts was President of the Caribbean Philosophical Association from 2016-19, and he served for several years on the Executive Editorial Board of the journal Political Theory. His publications include the books Creolizing Hannah Arendt (2024, with Marilyn Nissim-Sabat), A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass (2018), the collaborative volume Journeys in Caribbean Thought (2016), and the award-winning text Freedom as Marronage (2015) as well as numerous articles, book forewords (such as the 2024 foreword to Teodros Kiros's Zara Yacob's Inauguration of Modernity and Cardiocentrism), and chapters on creolizing the canon, Black radicalism, totalitarianism and modern politics, and the bounds of political theory. His work has appeared in periodicals such as Black Perspectives, Caribbean Studies, The C.L.R. James Journal, Contemporary Political Theory, HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, Perspectives on Politics, Small Axe, and Theory & Event. How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism is his next monograph, and he's at work both on a study of Haile Selassie I and the Oxford Handbook of Sylvia Wynter.
The De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking series aims to promote and foster the legacy of Hannah Arendt’s thought. A partnership between the Hannah Arendt Center (HAC) at Bard College and De Gruyter publishing, the lecture will be delivered annually by a prominent scholar. De Gruyter explicitly intends for the lecture series to be open to a broad approach to Arendt across the disciplines of not only philosophy and political theory but the humanities and social sciences more generally. The Lecturer is selected by the HAC in consultation with previous Lecturers and De Gruyter.
Neil Roberts: De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking
Keynote Address, March 2025: “Of Strivings for the Revolutionary Spirit”
ABSTRACT:
[T]he effort to recapture the lost spirit of revolution must, to a certain extent, consist in the
attempt at thinking together”.
—Hannah Arendt (1963)
[P]olitical liberty was nothing if the liberty of the spirit was unattained. This was the
revolutionary intention”.
—Sylvia Wynter (1968/69)
Needless to say, we do more than just survive.”
—Walter Rodney (1969)
A conference on Hannah Arendt and Black political thought may be jarring, if not altogether improbable, for some persons to comprehend. Yet it very well might be needed now more than ever. This keynote address examines strivings for the revolutionary spirit and what such strivings
reveal about the contours of modern Black political thought and Arendt studies between past and future.
The 2025 De Gruyter-Arendt Center Lecture in Political Thinking proceeds in four parts. First, it describes core claims from Neil Roberts’s collaborative book, Creolizing Hannah Arendt (2024), on the notion of creolization and the centrality of thinking—particularly the idea of
“creolizing thinking.” It discusses, in turn, the following key questions in Africana thought that help frame this endeavor: the identity question, the equality question, and the freedom question.
Second, the lecture defines what we mean respectively by “revolution” and “the revolutionary spirit.” Discerning the latter (both lost and recaptured) involves negotiating the conflicting strivings for lasting stability on the one hand and new beginnings, or natality, on the other hand. Careful attention to the landscape of intellectual traditions is also essential to critical assessments of these strivings. This facilitates the interpretation of experiences and ideas including enslavement, totalitarianism, prejudice, racism, violence, love, liberation, action, freedom, the human, and power, among other categories.
Third, the lecture pivots more narrowly towards the years 1968-1970 and the lives and work then of three intellectuals whom, when analyzed together, as often isn’t the case, illuminate strivings for and challenges to the revolutionary spirit: Hannah Arendt, the German-Jewish émigré political theorist; Sylvia Wynter, the Jamaican novelist, philosopher, and cultural critical; and Walter Rodney, the Guyanese Pan-Africanist and historian of political thought.
The lecture’s final part is a reflection on creolizing Arendt, creolizing thinking, and the benefits and costs of revolution for Afromodern actors imbued with the revolutionary spirit.