Protesting Citizenship: Migrant Activisms by Imogen Tyler

Author:Imogen Tyler [Tyler, Imogen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781315089393
Google: pKPFtAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 35635888
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

Natal politics

We are all born. Working against a long philosophical tradition that has given primacy to the shared horizon of death, in 1958, Arendt stated that ‘Natality and not mortality, may be the central category of political thought’ (Arendt 1958, p. 9). What Arendt means by politics is the capacity to speak and act in the public sphere. For her, ‘politics occurs when people who are equal come together to discuss and debate their differences without knowing what the material outcomes of political debate will be. In this sense, politics is always a new beginning, an attempt to move into an unknown future, which is always coupled to an originary capacity to begin – a capacity granted by the fact of birth itself (see Baraitser and Tyler 2011, Tyler 2013). Arendt suggests that without some fundamental understanding of the natality of the human condition, there can be no freedom, no social change and no human future. Arendt suggests that the absence of this primary fact from histories of thought represents a significant lacuna in political and philosophical traditions. Arendt’s insistence on thinking natality as the basis for politics is radical in the context of a European tradition so overwhelming preoccupied with death, loss, terror and mourning. However, for Arendt, natal politics bears no relation to childbirth and the reproductive sphere. The labours of women (social reproduction) are for Arendt hidden within the private realm of the household, while of course being absolutely foundational to and sustaining the public sphere. Birth, Arendt insists, is an experience ‘beyond speech’, which is ‘antipolitical by definition’ (1958, p. 63). Indeed for Arendt, the public sphere depends on the fact that ‘man does not know where he comes from’ (1958, p. 63). In contradistinction to this claim, the mothers at Yarl’s Wood and in the Niger Delta, insist, through the bearing of their naked maternal bodies, that maternal origin is acknowledged. Drawing on another much longer pre-colonial epistemological tradition, they enact natality as a politics of resistance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.