Frantz Fanon
January 15-19, 2024
The University of the West Indies
Mona Campus
Kingston, Jamaica
Application Deadline has passed
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Call for Paper Proposals: Arendt and/on Race
Building upon the success of OSUN’s Hannah Arendt Humanities Network (HAHN) Text Seminars, the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College is inviting proposals for papers to be considered for a new edited volume exploring 20th century German philosopher Hannah Arendt's engagement with race and racial thinking.
Recognizing the importance of sustained intellectual engagement with key texts in the humanities, HAHN's Annual Text Seminars provide opportunities for focused study and in-depth analysis, empowering scholars to deepen their understanding of complex ideas and engage in meaningful dialogue with peers. The 2023 Text Seminar brought together scholars from around the world for an exploration of Arendt's writings on race and race thinking from the late 1930s to the 1960s, providing a comprehensive overview of her evolving perspectives on this critical issue. Participants explored the complexities of Arendt's ideas, considered the historical context of her work, and engaged in critical reflection on the contemporary relevance of her insights.
“Giving people the experience of reading a text closely in ways that are both collegial and exploratory and open but intellectual, in the greatest sense of the word, it returns people to the joy of thinking together and learning from each other,” said Roger Berkowitz, Founder and Director of the Hannah Arendt Center and OSUN’s Hannah Arendt Humanities Network. “The idea that each of us brings a text to bear, we each take a part of the text, we read it out loud, we interpret it, we talk about it, we ask questions, other people respond - it reminds us of the joy of what it means to be an intellectual.”
HAHN invites OSUN scholars, including those who participated in the 2023 seminar, to contribute their research and perspectives to this call for paper proposals.The edited volume will offer a valuable platform for OSUN scholars to:- Share their insights on Arendt's complex and multifaceted engagement with race and racial thinking.
- Contribute to the current scholarly conversation on Arendt's legacy as a thinker of "race"/racism.
- Engage their work in dialogue with other scholars and diverse perspectives.
- Be part of a significant publication in the field of Arendtian studies.
- Paper proposal deadline: February 1, 2024
- Notification of acceptance: March 1, 2024
- Full paper submission deadline for accepted proposals: June 1, 2024
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Call for Applications has closed:
2024 Text Seminar
The 2024 Text Seminar will be hosted by the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus. We will closely read and discuss Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. This book provides profound analysis of the enduring issues of colonialism, racism, identity, and resistance that continue to shape our world. It offers valuable insights and perspectives for those interested in social justice, decolonization, and the pursuit of a more equitable and inclusive society.
Seminar Format: The 2024 Text Seminar features a dynamic format designed to foster engagement and meaningful discussions.
- Expert Presentations: Several esteemed scholars and experts will deliver invited keynote presentations on various aspects of the chosen text, providing valuable insights and perspectives.
- Participant-Led Discussions: Participants will lead discussions on specific sections, chapters, or themes within the text. Each full participant will be responsible for preparing and guiding a discussion session of one chapter (or part of one chapter) or theme of the book that aligns with their interests and expertise.
- Attendees: In addition to scholars from within the OSUN network, the seminar will also accommodate up to 3 outside international participants, enhancing the diversity of perspectives and scholarly expertise.
What is the Text Seminar?
Each year the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network and the Arendt Center hosts a Text Seminar. We bring together OSUN scholars and up to two outside international experts for one week to read closely a classic work of political or democratic thinking. Read about past years' texts below!
2021: Karl Popper's The Open Society
For our inaugural Text Seminar, we read Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies. This is the book that greatly influenced the founder of OSUN, George Soros. It is one of the great works of political thinking that defends liberal freedom over and against totalitarian movements.The inaugural text seminar occurred in July 2021 in Rhinebeck, NY, near Bard College’s New York campus.
Read more here
2022: Hannah Arendt's Vita Activa
This year’s seminar revisited Hannah Arendt’s pivotal work The Human Condition (1958), alongside the German version, Vita activa. Oder vom tätigen Leben (1960). There are key differences between the two versions, including new arrangements of ideas, changes in emphasis and quotations, and new allusions to philosophical and literary traditions. The books are exemplary of Arendt’s postwar writing practice, in which she prepared different versions of her writing for German and English-speaking audiences.
Read more here
2023: Arendt and/on Race
Hannah Arendt is one of few canonical political thinkers who wrote extensively about race. The Origins of Totalitarianism contains two key chapters on the emergence of racism as a political ideology and the way racism works through bureaucratic as opposed to legal governance. As a Jew who suffered through the rise and reign of Nazism, she analyzed antisemitism as a form of racism. In seeking to understand the ideological power of antisemitism, she came to understand both antisemitism and racism as anti-legal, anti-national, and globalist ideologies based upon quasi-scientific ideas of racial superiority and inferiority. Race, she argued, is "not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death."
Arendt’s arrival in the United States in 1940 confronted her with new racial and racist dynamics, particularly with the legacy of slavery and anti-Black racism but also with new forms of “minority” activism. In fact, her most prominent conceptual contribution to political theory, the notion of power, may have taken inspiration from what were arguably the most important grassroots political phenomena of her time, Civil Rights and the Black Power movements that followed it.
Read more here