Antiquity, Tradition, and Anti-Blackness in Hannah Arendt's Public Sphere

Abstract

summary: Scholarship on Hannah Arendt's receptions of Greco-Roman antiquity has largely neglected debates about anti-Blackness in her writing. To begin to fill this gap, this article focuses on Arendt's concept of the public ( The Human Condition ) and her condemnations of Black student movements ( On Violence ). Her account of how texts confer immortality on people in the public sphere clarifies the connections between an exclusive ideal of the public, an exclusive textual tradition, and an exclusive view of humanity. Arendt's work raises a challenge for classicists: can commitment to the immortality of a textual tradition be disentangled from anti-Blackness?