‘The Definite Is the Shadow and not the Owner’: Hannah Arendt in the Shadows of Sovereignty

Abstract

The first part of this chapter shows how Hannah Arendt’s critique of sovereignty can be situated in the modern refugee history that she herself lived and chronicled so eloquently. What later became plurality in her thinking began as a question of survival for a historically new kind of people – the ‘we’ of her famous essay, ‘We Refugees’. Refugee history, however, did not end with Arendt’s new life as an émigré political theorist in Cold War America. The second part of the chapter focuses on the recent writing of the Palestinian poet, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh. Writing of the ‘plurality of lives’ (his phrasing) that exist in Baddawi Camp, Northern Lebanon, Qasmiyeh picks up from where Arendt stopped: with the question of how to both survive and begin again in the shadows of sovereignty. At once conserving lives and memories otherwise lost to statelessness, and at the same time challenging the terms of that loss, in Qasmiyeh’s poetry plurality does not converge neatly around conventional understandings of sovereignty – which, as Arendt also understood, at least for those who have been failed by those understandings, may well be the point.