Book Review: Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, by Kathryn T. Gines

• Author: Roger Berkowitz
• Date: 01 October 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591716630631
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Book Reviews 815

out-of-hand and claims to discover no pristine theoretical vehicle, plumbing

each instead for whatever unanticipated moments of epistemological and

political resistance they offer.

Understood in context, each of her theoretical pairs negotiates while

resisting the prevalent scientific racisms of their respective moments, and

Hooker’s sharp reading of the shift from a jumbled nineteenth-century tool-

box of racial histories to the eugenics of the early twentieth century repre-

sents one of the most engaging minor threads holding the text together.

Through this and other lenses, Hooker provides important and convincing

correctives for interpreting her thinkers—no small feat, given the thousands

of pages of existing analysis dedicated to each. Taken together and in dynamic

tension, these shared and conflicting visions “prefigure the emergence of a

multiracial, decolonized Global South that is still not yet fully realized,” and

Hooker’s South–South juxtaposition subverts the “epistemological

Eurocentrism” that taints even much comparative political theorizing by

assuming Europe as a mandatory reference point (198–99). At the same time,

her own commitments remain clear enough: to a radical view of mestizaje as

a political practice of black and brown solidarity; to a globally egalitarian

vision; and to a Third World feminist critique too often—but not always—

absent in the four subalternized men she considers.

The stakes of rethinking race across the American hemisphere are indeed

high, and not only for the reasons that Hooker raises. At a moment in which

US movements are struggling in the streets against white supremacist thugs—

be they ICE agents or the police—many are also struggling with one another

over what framework best accommodates the fraught (dis-)unity of those

struggles. Against those who would pose insurmountable barriers to black–

brown organizing, reifying the exceptionalism of experiences of chattel slav-

ery or indigenous dispossession and genocide, many are seeking a framework

for grasping shared histories and struggles in the long night of hemispheric

white supremacy that began in 1492. For this task, Theorizing Race in the

Americas provides some essential tools.

Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question, by Kathryn T. Gines. Bloomington, IN:

Indiana University Press, 2014.

Reviewed by: Roger Berkowitz, Bard College Political Studies, Amandale-on-Hudson, NY

DOI: 10.1177/0090591716630631

Hannah Arendt was German Jew and carried prejudices with her to the United

States. It is an easy matter to collect quotations showing that Arendt could be