60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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168 development dialogue december 2008 – revisiting the heart of darkness aristocratic race-thinking came to be integrated with European nationalist movements in the course of the confl ict between emerging nationalities with the state in the dissolving dynasties and empires (Russia and Austria), and in the course of the European colonial enterprise. In Germany, a defensive nationalism arose under the impact of French occupation. 14 It would have lost its appeal upon national unifi cation, Arendt claims, had not imperialism revived it through ‘the specifi c amalgamation of the race and “elite” concepts’ (Arendt [1951] 1976: 174, 183-184). 15 Racism has revived elements of race-thinking everywhere. An analogous case has been construed by Foucault for Nazi antisemitism, in which separate streams of race-thinking and biologically based racism converged, with a re-inscription of the legend of the warring races in State racism (see Foucault [1976] 2003: 82). 16 The logic of the convergence of ‘race as caste/elite’ and biologically referenced racism can, likewise, fi nd a parallel in the central African context. But while the grounds for construing such an extension based on analogy might be apparent in its conditions, they are much less clear when judging its eff ects. We have already established that any simple account of the role of the Hamitic Hypothesis in genocidal contexts, as a ‘boomerang’ bouncing back to its supposed point of origin, presents a rather blunt analytical instrument. Neither can we narrow the analogies to such an extent as to construe parallels between perpetrator and victim groups. The absurdity of the latter attempt is patent: ‘Who …in the moral universe of Holocaust parallelism, are the Tutsis? Are they ‘the Jews’, victims of intended extermi- 14 German race-thinking, Arendt argues, had taken a diff erent turn. With the French occupation, German race-thinking sought to unite people against foreign domination by invoking common origins. Thus, a race-thinking emerged that was not tied to the nobility (Arendt [1951] 1976: 165), but invoked a notion of ‘innate personality’ (Arendt [1951] 1976: 168). 15 One of the leading intellectuals who articulated this amalgamation relatively early on, and whose infl uence was felt throughout the second half of the 19th and early 20th century, was Joseph-Artur Comte de Gobineau (with his Essai sur l’Inégalité des Races Humaines ([1853] 1967). While he held onto the 18th century doctrines of the divided origins of the French people (the bourgeoisie being descendants of Gallic- Roman slaves, and the nobility being of Germanic origin, international in character, he developed the idea of the ‘secret law of the fall of civilisations’ due to ‘mixture of blood’ producing the ‘degeneration of race’ (Arendt [1951] 1994: 165, 172).In the writings of Joseph-Artur Comte de Gobineau, Arendt detects both the concatenation between ‘race’ and ‘elite’, and a modifi cation of the ‘Hamite Hypothesis’ to the eff ect of postulating the appearance of a degenerate white race in Africa. 16 Foucault: Nazism was thus able to reuse a whole popular, almost medieval mythology that allowed State racism to function within an ideologico-mythical landscape similar to that to that of the popular struggles which, at a given moment, could support and make it possible to formulate the theme of the race struggle. ([1976] 2003: 82) In a similar vein, the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles were rendered in Nazi propaganda in terms of the enslavement of the Germanic race by Slavs (Foucault [1976] 2003: 82).
lineages of racism in genocidal contexts 169 nation? Or are they “the Nazis”, putative embodiment of a superior race?’ (Miles 2000: 112; quoted in Eltringham 2006: 439) Both Arendt and Foucault outline the possible points of conjunction of race-thinking and racism; but they (Arendt in particular) do so only on the basis of a rigorous historical, conceptual and discursive diff erentiation and distinction of the conditions of the inter-articulation of race-thinking and racism, continental and overseas imperialism, respectively. Latter-day scholarship on discursive regimes of empire, on the other hand, tends to confl ate the ‘war of the races’ idea with modern biopolitical racism, tracing ‘scientifi c racism’ back to the Enlightenment and with it, the colonial enterprise. In an attempt to highlight the continuities between colonial racism, anti-semitism and genocide, this scholarship invokes the authority of Arendt’s Totalitarianism book; but it tends to neglect the distinction, carefully drawn by Arendt, between racethinking and racism, continental and overseas imperialism. Scholarship upholding these tenets, I would argue, misrecognises the contribution of Arendt’s book on which it – implicitly or explicitly – draws extensively for its own theorisations. The insights into the diff erent lineages of racism in their divergences and conjunctions that are among the unique contributions of Arendt’s book, are only being brought to the fore in recent writing on the African post-colony. 17 Arendt casts totalitarianism within a longue durée that provides a worldhistorical perspective on colonialism and genocide (Stockhammer 2005: 143). This perspective has inspired theorists of the African post-colony. As Mahmood Mamdani remarks, ‘unlike many who had tried to closet [the Holocaust] to the internal history of Europe, Hannah Arendt’s great merit was to locate it within the context of a wider history, that of Europe’s global conquest and expansion’ (Mamdani 2001: 76). In particular, this approach has motivated the analysis of what has mistakenly become known as the ‘Rwandan genocide’ to encompass the entire Central African region – including the Congo, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda (Mamdani 2001: 8), and all of these countries in precarious post-colonial (nation) state formations. It is an ambit for which Hannah Arendt’s analysis of declining European empires and nation states at the beginning of the 20th century could have served as a template, pervaded, as both are and were, by movements of people dislocated by discrimination on the basis of both ethnic and racial categorisation; by homelessness, diaspora, statelessness, exile and renewed expulsion; by invasion and military-style repatriation; by civil war, state failures and 17 However, curiously, this is not what Mamdani acknowledges as his indebtedness to Arendt’s analysis.
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no. 50 | december 2008 Revisiting t
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Revisiting the heart of darkness -
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Acknowledgements The larger part of
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Dennis Brutus, born 1924 in then Rh
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8 development dialogue december 200
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In short, both the understanding of
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Behind most mass violence lurk econ
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ehind most mass violence lurk econo
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Is there a south perspective on gen
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is there a south perspective on gen
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The Voksenåsen Statement Genocides
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This Development Dialogue is publis
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60 years after the UN Convention - Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation

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