Memories of exclusion

Introduction

Hannah Arendt develops a radical notion of citizenship that pushes the bounds of current debate concerning the problem of political exclusion. In her view, overcoming exclusion depends not merely on having rights and liberties in the private sphere; beyond this, it involves reclaiming our political existence in the public sphere through the shared remembrance and affirmation of the traditions that give meaning to the modern political community. Arendt thus conceives of citizenship not as a static and indefinitely expandable legal status, but rather as a lived and embodied activity that promises a home in the world for human beings insofar as they act in concert to remember and appropriate anew the political traditions that they have inherited. ¹

The purpose of this paper is to deepen and challenge Arendt’s account of the tradition that she believes we are tasked with preserving in the modern era. Arendt’s robust notion of citizenship depends on the remembrance of what she describes as the revolutionary tradition of the modern age, embodied, in her view, by the French and American revolutions. My aim is to expand this notion of the modern revolutionary tradition in light of a less appreciated event, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804). The Haitian Revolution marked a decisive moment during the Age of Revolution, giving birth to the first instance of the emancipation of an enslaved population in the New World. Yet, the formerly enslaved who achieved French citizenship in consequence of this revolution nevertheless remained subject to the forms of exclusion that their enfranchisement promised to overcome. In this paper, I maintain, first, that crucial aspects of Arendt’s notion of citizenship are evoked in the achievement of citizenship by the formerly enslaved in the Haitian Revolution. In view of this, I then argue that the Haitian Revolution occasions the critical question of whether citizenship, even as Arendt conceives of it, is enough to overcome the violence and exclusion that continues to haunt diasporic peoples decades and centuries after becoming enfranchised.

Scholars have turned to Arendt’s omission of the Haitian Revolution to provide further evidence of the Eurocentrism of her broader political project and, especially, her analysis of the social. ² This discourse has undoubtedly raised important questions concerning the viability of Arendt’s project for addressing the global impact of slavery and colonization on political life today. Yet, more may nevertheless be done to bring into focus the implications of the Haitian Revolution for complicating some of Arendt’s most profound insights into the politics of exclusion. My aim therefore is to give new orientation to these debates by focusing not on the gap in Arendt’s analysis, but rather on the implications of this event itself for understanding the role of remembrance in political life. Drawing on the work of Édouard Glissant, I argue that while Arendt believes that being a citizen means affirming a coherent historical narrative in order to forget the violence and exclusion of the past, the events of the Haitian Revolution indicate that the modern political tradition does not admit of being remembered in this way. Instead, it is marked by fractures and interruptions that can neither be forgotten nor held together consistently in a single historical consciousness. I therefore turn to the Haitian Revolution to suggest that overcoming political exclusion depends not only on citizenship and the narrative it seeks to affirm, but also on remaining open to being displaced from this narrative by those memories of violence and exclusion that continue to haunt the modern political arena. With this, we find that the Haitian Revolution serves not merely to remind us of the shortcomings of Arendt’s discourse on the European legacy of slavery and colonization; beyond this, it opens new paths to understanding our responsibility to the world we have inherited. Specifically, it provides a platform to begin conceiving of the space of politics anew, not as a sanctuary from the ghosts of the past, as Arendt suggests, but rather as a kind of haunted house in which these ghosts are able to dwell and help guide political practice.

Tradition and the politics of remembrance

Arendt keys her conception of citizenship to a notion of remembrance that has its origins in the relationship Martin Heidegger establishes between the finitude of memory and the possibilities this opens up for finding a home in the world. Indeed, Arendt’s analysis of citizenship and the homecoming it promises has deep resonances with Heidegger’s discourse on the authentic historicity of Dasein in §74 of Being and Time, no less than Friedrich Nietzsche’s notion of repetition, which Heidegger draws on to explain how Dasein can return to itself from out of its throwness by appropriating its inheritance anew. ³ Arendt, to be sure, is among the greatest critics of the dark light that Heidegger casts on the political in his formulation of the project of fundamental ontology. Yet, even in her efforts to challenge Heidegger—upholding the political as the site of both self and world-disclosure and the space for the appearance of human plurality— she nevertheless takes seriously his critique of notions of memory inherited from the tradition of Western metaphysics. ⁴ Jeffery Andrew Barash explains that for Arendt, an originating notion of remembrance “cannot be as reminiscence of the a-temporal and eternal in post-Socratic Platonic metaphysics, but as ‘organized remembrance’ in the political quest for temporal perdurability in the unpredictability and fluctuating world of human affairs.” ⁵ Whereas Heidegger keys his conception of memory to the forgetfulness of being that is always at stake in human finitude, Arendt offers a distinctly political interpretation of this idea, which comes into view perhaps most clearly in her discourse on tradition.

In turning to the notion of tradition, Arendt wishes to show that remembrance is a political concept, conceiving of it as the transmission from one generation to the next of an original moment of foundation or new beginning that gives meaning and orientation to the world. ⁶ In this, she challenges the assumption of Western metaphysics that history functions in the service of pure knowledge, revealing truths about the past that exist universally and independently of our own existence. ⁷ Moreover, whereas modern historiography has followed the method of the sciences, reducing the events of the past to a part of a larger, invisible process governed by a determinate end, Arendt’s notion of tradition enables her to re-inscribe remembrance into political life, treating it as the story of the spontaneity of human action, which is to say, the story of human freedom. ⁸

While the inherent spontaneity of human action—what Arendt describes as the human condition of natality—makes possible the birth of new meaning in the world, such events of foundation only retain their meaning insofar as there exists a political space in which they can be seen, heard, and remembered by others. Drawing on the Greek notion of praxis, Arendt explains that it is through action, or word and deed in the space of politics, that we realize the native capacity for new beginnings inherent in the fact of our birth. ⁹ In this, action is distinct from the other fundamental activities of human life, namely, labor and work, because it “is not forced upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work,” but rather involves the spontaneous and free enactment of one’s ability to initiate something new in the world. ¹⁰ Yet, Arendt explains, too, that words and deeds are the most ephemeral of all manmade things and “would never leave any trace without the help of remembrance.” ¹¹ She therefore argues that the original task of history was political, saving human deeds from the futility of oblivion by preserving them in the collective consciousness of a community. ¹² She says:

History as a category of human existence is of course older than the written word, older than Herodotus, older even than Homer. Not historically, but poetically speaking its beginning lies rather in the moment when Ulysses, at the court of the king of the Phaeacians, listened to the story of his own deeds and sufferings, to the story of his life, now a thing outside himself, an “object” for all to see and to hear. What had been sheer occurrence now became “history.” ¹³

Whereas Arendt draws on the Greeks to develop her notion of action, she turns to the Romans to develop her notion of tradition. ¹⁷ Through tradition, she argues, the Romans made remembrance a responsibility not just of the poet or historian who narrates the history of human action, but also of the citizen who affirms and appropriates this narrative by acting in concert with others in the space of politics to initiate something anew. It was the Romans, she explains, who discovered in the memory of foundation, and, specifically, in the unique and unrepeatable event of the founding of the Roman city, that action could have binding political authority across generations. For this reason, Arendt says, “The most deeply Roman divinities were Janus, the god of beginning, with whom, as it were, we still begin our year, and Minerva, the goddess of remembrance.” ¹⁸ The continuation of the authority that flowed from the foundation depended on tradition, which transformed the remembrance of this originating moment into a political activity. For the Romans, the enactment of one’s citizenship through speech and action in the space of politics was, at the same time, an affirmation of the tradition one had inherited, “binding every act back to the sacred beginning of Roman history, adding, as it were, to every single moment the whole weight of the past. Gravitas, the ability to bear this weight, became the outstanding trait of the Roman character”. ¹⁹

Understood as the repetition of this original moment of foundation, however, tradition consisted not in scientifically cataloguing the events of the past, but rather in appropriating the words and deeds of the city’s ancestors, transforming them into precedents or authoritative models for political behavior in the present. ²⁰ In this, the narrative of the Roman story of foundation was permeable; there was an awareness of the myth and openness of the foundation story, along with the demand, in virtue of this, to re-read it for the sake of gathering together a plurality of citizens under a single law. As Barbara Cassin explains,

It is not a matter of reproducing something identical, but of fabricating something else…Rome thus becomes the paradigm of “included alterity.” Any Roman citizen would have at least two homelands, one by nature, the place of his birth, and the other by law, conferred upon him by civitas. ²¹

Drawing on the Roman notion of tradition, Arendt thus interprets remembrance in its political significance as a repetition of the moment of foundation or beginning that comes to appear in the world through the concerted efforts of citizens to speak and act in the presence of others in the space of politics. Significantly, however, the meaning that is sustained through this repetition arises not from its identity to the origin it repeats; quite to the contrary, insofar as we are born into a world that we neither choose nor control, these moments come to appear as meaningful only insofar as we make them our own by augmenting and appropriating them anew. Because our memory is finite, our efforts to repeat the founding moment of our political community will always involve a dynamic and novel re-enactment of it, differentiating it from its origin such that it becomes a part of a shared reality that belongs to the present and can, in turn, be carried forward into the future. ²³ In this, the affirmation of tradition, or the remembrance of the moment of foundation, will always involve some measure of forgetting, casting into oblivion those events of the past that keep it from coming into appearance with a coherent narrative structure that orients us toward a common world. Arendt maintains that it is precisely in virtue of this forgetfulness that political action can heal the wounds of the past; it can create a home in the world even for those who were once cast out, leaving behind those histories of violence and exclusion that cannot be held together consistently with the story of one’s political community. ²⁴ By turning to tradition, Arendt therefore suggests that remembrance, and the forgetting it always entails, may be interpreted as a responsibility of citizenship that promises a home in the world for human beings insofar as they act in concert to affirm and appropriate the narrative of human freedom that they have inherited. This, in turn, provides a platform for her to conceive of citizenship anew in light of what she perceives as the loss of tradition in the modern age.

Remembrance, citizenship, and the revolutionary tradition

Arendt develops her account of tradition in a myriad of contexts throughout her work, considering it in relation to the status of such concepts as truth, authority, and freedom in the modern age. It may therefore be interpreted as a part of her broader attempt to think beyond the liberal assumptions of modern politics that she believes have led modern individuals to forget the meaningfulness of these concepts and their bearing on political life. Through her discourse on tradition, she illustrates that remembrance and history no longer belong to political life in the modern age, and, because of this, the story of human freedom—the story that reminds us of our home in the world—is no longer able to appear. This, she argues, can be traced to a failure to preserve in our collective memory what she describes as the revolutionary tradition of the modern age, embodied in her view by the French and American revolutions. ²⁵

Arendt locates the birth of the modern political tradition in the revolutionary period of the late 18th century. In her 1963 text, On Revolution, Arendt turns to the French and American revolutions to suggest that the guiding principle of the modern era is revolution insofar as its traditions, institutions, and values are held together by the belief that the course of history can suddenly begin anew and a story that has never been told before can begin to unfold. ²⁶ In this, she explains, “Revolutions are the only political events that confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of new beginnings.” ²⁶ According to Arendt, the phenomenon of revolution is unique to the modern era insofar as it is driven by the twofold aim of liberating the oppressed for the sake of creating a permanent foundation for freedom. While a conception of political freedom based on the human capacity for new beginnings was well understood in antiquity, she explains, “The revolutionary spirit of the last centuries, that is the eagerness to liberate and to build a new house were freedom can dwell, is unprecedented and unequaled in all prior history.” ²⁷ In this, she says, the revolutions of the late eighteenth century brought a pathos of novelty into existence in the political sphere, or a belief, not merely in change, but in the possibility of ushering in an entirely new epoch aimed above all at the political constitution of a space for freedom. ²⁸

Arendt believes that we have lost sight of this revolutionary spirit, allowing it either to be swallowed up by the violent pursuit of the social interests of the masses, or confused with the drive to secure liberty in the private realm. ²⁹ Indeed, her praise of the Roman conception of tradition finds its photographic negative in her critique of the way in which the founding act of freedom in the context of the American Revolution has been forgotten on a global scale. While revolution has become commonplace in modern political life, she explains that it has primarily been guided not by the drive to create a foundation for freedom, but rather by the social concern for securing the basic necessities of life, a relic, she thinks, of the French Revolution. With this, she says:

The failure to incorporate the American Revolution into the revolutionary tradition has boomeranged upon the foreign policy of the United States, which begins to pay an exorbitant price for world-wide ignorance and for native oblivion…No less real, are the consequences of the American counterpart to the world’s ignorance, her own failure to remember that a revolution gave birth to the United States and that the republic was brought into existence by no “historical necessity” and no organic development, but by a deliberate act: the foundation of freedom. ³⁰

Arendt remains conflicted throughout her work as to whether it is possible to reclaim a relation to this revolutionary past. In works such as The Life of the Mind and her 1968 essay on Walter Benjamin, she acknowledges the limits of our ability to construct a coherent narrative in an age that has broken so dramatically from its own tradition. Yet, even here, she insists that we nevertheless remain responsible for the world in which we find ourselves, and, in virtue of this, “must firmly take [the present] by the horns to be able to consult the past,” selecting fragments from the debris of history in order to breath new meaning into it. ³² Indeed, for Arendt, it is only by taking responsibility for the world in this way that we might begin to renew its meaningfulness. In her view, the broken thread of tradition in the modern age has led to the destruction of the world or that space in which human beings appear to one another in the fullness of their humanity as irreducibly unique and natively capable of acting “against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability.” ³³ In their hiddenness, homelessness, and impotence, Arendt argues, modern individuals have become lonely, unable to see themselves or others in their humanity as belonging to a common world. ³⁴ Arendt associates this loss of a world with the rise of totalitarianism at the beginning of the 20th century, suggesting that it was only insofar as human beings had already lost the ability to see one another in their singularity and plurality that they became vulnerable to being transformed into interchangeable parts of the necessary movements of nature and history. ³⁵

In order to combat the worldlessness of modern life, along with the contemporary forms of exclusion and alienation that accompany it, Arendt thus calls for a new conception of citizenship. In her view, citizenship must be understood not as an indefinitely expandable legal status, but rather as a lived and embodied activity that involves speaking and acting with others in the space of politics to remember and appropriate anew the traditions, values, and institutions that give meaning to the modern world. It thus involves taking shared responsibility for reclaiming and affirming the revolutionary tradition of the modern age in the full illumination of the public realm, even if only an approximation of its original spirit can be recovered. ³⁶ Such a conception of citizenship, Arendt argues, has the potential to overcome the “predicament of meaningless” that has overtaken the modern era as a result of the destruction of the world. ³⁷ This, however, depends on renewing the role of remembrance in political life through the shared commemoration and appropriation of those words and deeds that constitute the collective identity of the modern political community. ³⁸ As Irene McMullin explains:

Without such a shared history—and the normative stance embodied in the community’s decisions about what counts as memorable—the permanence of world necessary to shelter us from the elemental flux of nature is impossible. Exemplary acts serve to anchor a community around a vision of excellence; they provide a public model of what it means to be fully human. By choosing what words and deeds are worthy of remembrance, then, the community defines its identity. ³⁹

Arendt thus maintains that understanding the world we have inherited depends on considering the general implications of the complexities inherent in revolution for modern political existence. ⁴⁰ Yet, given her notion of citizenship, we may wonder whether her account of these complexities goes far enough. Whereas Arendt emphasizes what has been lost and forgotten, I maintain that more may nevertheless be said about a certain excess of memory that seems to be entailed by the very aims of the revolutionary tradition. Insofar as the modern tradition is guided by the twofold aim of liberating the oppressed for the sake of founding a new home where freedom can dwell, it seems to require the inclusion of more than we can hold together in a single, coherent historical narrative that can orient citizens—both new and old—toward the shared reality of a common world. Indeed, our tradition, perhaps unlike those of previous epochs, seems to be characterized by fractures, interruptions, and inconsistencies that may displace or contravene the story we tell of ourselves, but that are nevertheless bound up with the world we have inherited. In light of this, I maintain that it is necessary to go a step beyond Arendt to respond to her call to take responsibility for the modern world. Whereas Arendt turns to the French and American revolutions, I turn now to the less appreciated Haitian Revolution, which provides a unique point of departure for deepening and challenging Arendt’s notion of citizenship and the narrative it seeks to affirm. By expanding Arendt’s discourse of the modern revolutionary tradition within this colonial context, I maintain that it is possible to develop a new frame for thinking about the memory of the exclusion of diasporic peoples from the modern liberal state and its implications for understanding the world we have inherited.

The place of the Haitian Revolution in the modern political tradition

While the limitations of Arendt’s analysis of European slavery and colonization have been widely acknowledged, her specific omission of the Haitian Revolution has only recently begun to receive scholarly attention. This, in turn, has given way to a new set of critical debates in Arendt studies concerning the viability of her broader political project. ⁴¹ Yet, despite turning to the Haitian Revolution to forge a new path within this discourse, these scholars have nevertheless tended to return to a familiar criticism concerning Arendt’s treatment of the social. Katherine Gines and Sybille Fischer, for instance, have argued that Arendt’s blindness to the Haitian Revolution is further evidence of her unwillingness to treat the history of slavery and colonization as a political phenomenon. ⁴² Both regard this omission as symptomatic of a deeply ingrained Eurocentrism in Arendt’s thought, and Western political theory more generally, that calls into question the relevance of her theoretical framework for addressing the exclusion of diasporic people from the modern liberal state. As Gines explains:

The significance of the Haitian Revolution cannot be overstated even on Arendt’s own terms…The Haitian Revolution sought not only liberation from slavery and from the French colonial order but also the foundation of freedom for political participation and most certainly new beginnings and the unfolding of a story never told before—the establishment of an independent Black state by former slaves and their free allies. ⁴³

The field of historical and philosophical literature on the Haitian Revolution is as vast as it is diverse; my principal aim in what follows will simply be to highlight several decisive moments during this revolution to suggest that crucial aspects of Arendt’s lived and embodied notion of citizenship are evoked in the achievement of citizenship by the formerly enslaved in the Haitian Revolution. ⁴⁶ With this, I argue that while citizenship should have been enough to cast into oblivion the violence and exclusion of the past, the Haitian revolutionaries nevertheless remained haunted by the threat of its return. It may therefore be seen not only as a foundational moment of the revolutionary tradition, but one that also occasions the critical question of whether citizenship is enough to overcome the exclusion of diasporic people from the modern liberal state.

In 1789, as members of the French National Assembly were drafting the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in Paris, France was simultaneously engaged in the most lucrative colonial enterprise in the world. French Saint-Domingue, what is now Haiti, was France’s most prized colonial possession. Though Saint-Domingue was among the smallest of the European colonies in the Caribbean and Atlantic world, Laurent Dubois explains, “The livelihood of as many as a million of the twenty-five million inhabitants of France depended directly on the colonial trade. The slave colonies of the Caribbean were an engine for economic and social change in metropolitan France.” ⁴⁷ By 1789, Saint-Domingue was exporting half of the world’s coffee and as much sugar as Jamaica, Cuba, and Brazil combined. ⁴⁸ Nearly half a million enslaved Africans inhabited the colony, comprising 90% of its overall population and providing the labor force necessary to run Saint-Domingue’s 8000 plantations. ⁴⁹

The Haitian Revolution began against the backdrop of this colonial situation when, in 1791, 100,000 enslaved Africans in the northern territory of Saint-Domingue rose up in response to the promise of universal emancipation set forth by the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The remarkable success of the slave insurgents against the French troops between 1791 and 1793 ultimately led France to abolish slavery throughout the French Antilles and extend the rights of French citizenship to the formerly enslaved in 1794. ⁵⁰ While the Haitian revolutionaries could have declared independence from France at this moment, they did not. On the contrary, revolutionary leader and ex-slave Toussaint L’Ouverture decided to declare his allegiance to France, pledging to fulfill the ideals of the French Revolution by transforming Saint-Domingue from a colony of slaves into a “colony of citizens.” ⁵¹ In this, Dubois explains, the insurgents in Saint-Domingue and the French Antilles more generally played a direct role in reshaping the idea of Enlightenment citizenship during the Age of Revolution. ⁵² Through the efforts of the Haitian revolutionaries, those who had been excluded from the human community were, in principle, granted the right to appear as citizens in the full illumination of the public realm. In this, they brought the Enlightenment narrative of universal emancipation to bear perhaps more powerfully than ever before on the modern political arena. ⁵³

If we consider this in light of Arendt’s conception of the modern tradition, we find that decisive features of the revolutionary spirit are manifest in these events. Insofar as L’Ouverture was responsible for overseeing the first major transition from slavery to freedom in the New World, he was leading a revolution guided by an especially pronounced pathos of novelty, bringing into existence a story about the experience of human freedom that had never before been told. ⁵⁴ Under the leadership of L’Ouverture, the events of the Haitian Revolution unfolded according to the twofold concern for liberating the masses from the oppression of slavery and establishing a new and stable foundation for freedom in Saint-Domingue. As such, the story of the Haitian Revolution appears to embody the spirit of revolution that Arendt associates with the modern political tradition. Beyond this, the formerly enslaved who achieved French citizenship participated in the lived and embodied form of citizenship that Arendt endorses. That is, under L’Ouverture’s leadership, the new French citizens affirmed the revolutionary legacy of the modern age through their efforts to appropriate it anew within this colonial context. ⁵⁵

Yet, the events that unfolded in Saint-Domingue after the enslaved were enfranchised indicate that even after citizenship is granted, a trace of the violence and exclusion of the past may nevertheless remain at work in our political institutions, values, and traditions that threatens to forestall the event of appropriation that Arendt associates with finding a home in the world. In 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte attempted to reinstate slavery throughout the French Antilles and succeeded in having L’Ouverture deported to Paris in 1802 where he died in prison in 1803. ⁵⁶ This, in turn, led L’Ouverture’s successor, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, to call for independence from France, arguing that for the formally enslaved, being French and free were mutually exclusive ends. Despite the enduring effort of the formerly enslaved to embrace the French revolutionary tradition, the legacy of slavery and colonization did not fade from memory as Arendt suggests it should have. To the contrary, the threat of a return to the violence and exclusion of the past continued to haunt the new citizens, keeping them from coming into appearance as part of a common world.

The Haitian Declaration of Independence was adopted on 1 January 1804, marking the end of the only successful slave revolution in the western hemisphere and the beginning of the second independent nation in the Americas after the United States . Yet, unlike the United States Declaration of Independence, the language of the Haitian Declaration of Independence is quite different, emphasizing the trace of the violence and exclusion of the past that had been left behind even after citizenship was granted. This is reflected in following selections from the 1804 Haitian Declaration of Independence:

It is not enough to have expelled the barbarians who have bloodied our land for two centuries; it is not enough to have restrained those ever-evolving factions that one after another mocked the specter of liberty that France dangled before you. We must, with one last act of national authority, forever assure the empire of liberty in the country of our birth; we must take any hope of re-enslaving us away from the inhuman government that for so long kept us in the most humiliating torpor.

The French name still haunts our land. Everything revives the memories of the cruelties of this barbarous people: our laws, our habits, our towns, everything still carries the stamp of the French. Indeed! There are still French in our island, and you believe yourself free and independent of that republic, which, it is true, has fought all the nations, but which has never defeated those who wanted to be free…

Therefore vow before me to live free and independent, and to prefer death to anything that will try to place you back in chains. Swear, finally, to pursue forever the traitors and enemies of your independence. ⁵⁷

Though Arendt does not consider this event in her discourse on revolution, she gestures toward a similar problem in her analysis of the experience of exclusion in the Jewish diaspora. In her 1944 essay, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition” she considers how, despite becoming enfranchised at the end of the 18th century, the Jewish people in Europe continued to be excluded from the space of politics, unable to appear to their fellow citizens in the fullness of their humanity. ⁵⁸ She argues that the experience of emancipation for the Jewish people generated what she describes as a “pariah tradition” that has an integral role to play in understanding the experience of exclusion in modern political life. Yet, Arendt does not interpret this as a consequence of the founding moment of the revolutionary tradition. She is therefore unable to see what I will describe as a paradox of citizenship that necessitates the covering over of a part of the tradition that we are tasked with remembering and appropriating in political life. The Haitian Revolution, by contrast, makes explicit the place of this paradox in the original founding moment of the revolutionary tradition. Therefore, if we consider Arendt’s discourse on revolution within this context, we find that citizenship, even as she conceives of it, may not be enough to overcome the forms of violence and exclusion that continue to haunt diasporic peoples decades and centuries after becoming enfranchised.

The paradox of citizenship: Glissant on nonhistory

By expanding Arendt’s analysis beyond the French and American contexts to the Haitian Revolution, it is possible to bring into focus a paradox of citizenship that is entailed by the modern revolutionary tradition. This paradox consists in the conflict between the responsibility citizens have to preserve in their collective memory a coherent narrative of the modern revolutionary tradition and the way in which the very affirmation of this narrative covers over those memories of violence and exclusion that are bound up with it. Édouard Glissant’s account of “the quarrel with history” that he suggests characterizes the problem of historical consciousness in the Caribbean helps to clarify both the character and effect of the hiddenness of these unremembered histories in light of the European legacy of slavery and colonization. Focusing on the French Antilles, and Martinique in particular, he says, “The French Caribbean is the site of a history characterized by ruptures that began with a brutal dislocation, the slave trade.” ⁵⁹ Because of this, he maintains, a historical consciousness could not be deposited or sedimented in the Caribbean. Whereas European histories, Glissant argues, can be retained in our historical memory, appearing as unbroken continuums that claim to clarify the reality of a people, the history of the Caribbean came together “in the context of shock, contradiction, painful negation, and explosive forces,” and, as such, cannot be absorbed in its entirety into a collective consciousness. ⁶⁰ As this history was born not of a historical continuum, but through the displacement of this continuum in the colonies, it appears out of joint and discontinuous with history and, in its dislocation, partially concealed. For this reason, Glissant explains, the particular experience of history in the Caribbean and histories of a colonial origin more generally have taken on the character of “nonhistory.” ⁶¹ These so called nonhistories have been erased in the official documents and excluded from our collective memory. Yet, while one may expect them to fade into oblivion, Glissant explains that they in fact remain “obsessively present” in the lived experience of those who continue to carry them. ⁶²

Because such histories or nonhistories are displaced or dislocated from the continuum that characterizes history in the colonial motherland, Glissant argues that they come into appearance, not with clear consistency and linearity, but instead with stunning unexpectedness. He says:

The emergence of this common experience broken in time (of this concealed parallel in histories) that shapes the Caribbean at this time surprises us before we had even thought about this parallel. That means also that our history emerges at the edge of what we can tolerate, [and] this emergence must be related immediately to the complicated web of events in our past. The past, to which we were subjected, which has not yet emerged as history for us, is, however, obsessively present. ⁶³

Glissant’s discussion offers an important critical perspective on Arendt’s account of remembrance in political life, putting into relief the danger involved in failing to appreciate the significance of these fractures and inconsistencies for politics today. This yearning for an ideal history, and the failure to remain open to these hidden histories can be seen as further perpetuating the isolation and loneliness that Arendt associates with the broken thread of tradition, and that she believes keeps a common world from coming into view. Moreover, the propagation of the myth of ideal history has the potential to destroy human plurality and natality, concealing the “stunning unexpectedness” and irreducible diversity of these histories. Arendt, to be sure, resists notions of history that reduce the spontaneity of human action to process. ⁶⁵ In light of this, it would be overly simplistic to suggest that Arendt’s own notion of remembrance, and the forgetting it entails, participates in the oppressive cleansing that Glissant associates with the myth of ideal history. Even so, her account of the homecoming promised by citizenship runs up against its own limits when considered in light of the nonhistories that Glissant identifies. ⁶⁶ We may therefore wonder whether her analysis of the responsibility citizens have to remember in political life runs the risk of covering over a new iteration of human plurality that comes to appear in the obscurity of these nonhistories as a result of European colonial expansion and the global displacement to which it has given rise.

Conclusion: Caring for a haunted house

Glissant’s discussion of nonhistory thus provides an important frame for thinking about those histories of violence and exclusion that continue to repeat themselves in contemporary political life. With this, it forms a basis to account for why the memory of this violence and exclusion continues to haunt diasporic people decades and centuries after becoming enfranchised. While these histories may get covered over with the implementation of citizenship, unable to be held together with the narrative that citizenship seeks to affirm, they nevertheless remain bound up with the legacy of the world we have inherited. As such, they do not fade into the oblivion as Arendt suggests they should, but instead remain unappropriated and obsessively present, repeating themselves in the form of a threat of a return to the violence and exclusion of the past. These memories of exclusion thus have a spectral or ghostly quality, as Jacques Derrida might describe it, returning with each dynamic re-enactment of the moment of foundation and displacing us from the familiarity and continuity of the narrative that orients us toward a common world. ⁶⁷

The question thus arises as to whether we can find a home in the world given the paradox of citizenship that seems to be necessitated by the responsibility citizens have to affirm a coherent, consistent narrative of the revolutionary tradition that they have inherited. If the very affirmation of one’s citizenship entails the covering over of those histories of violence and exclusion that are bound up with the tradition we have inherited, must we concede, as figures like Derrida do, that our efforts to find a home in the world will only ever disclose our exile from it? Or, as Arendt might suggest, are these ghosts merely symptomatic of an unwillingness to forget the wounds of the past for the sake of founding the world anew? In turning to the Haitian Revolution, I wish to suggest that there may be a third way between these two paths that is responsive to the excess of the modern tradition and the paradox of citizenship that it entails, but that nevertheless holds open the possibility for finding a home in it.

Arendt seems right to insist on the possibility of finding a home in the modern world regardless of how fraught our relation to the past might be. Yet, accomplishing this seems to depend on developing a new and more expansive notion of homecoming that makes room in the space of politics, not just for citizens, but also for the ghosts of the past that continue to haunt the modern political arena. Rather than recoiling from these ghosts, what seems to be called for is an openness to being displaced by them in our efforts to remember and renew the story of the world we have inherited. In this, taking responsibility for the legacy of the modern world seems to require a new conception of the space of politics, understood not as a home that promises a sanctuary from the ghosts of the past, but rather as a kind of haunted house in which these ghosts are able to dwell and help guide political practice. Understood this way, these ghosts point not to exile, but rather to a condition of overcrowding in modern life, whereby we find ourselves always already overwhelmed by the presence of more than we can grasp. The problem of exclusion and alienation in modern life may therefore be framed in ontological terms as a failure to stand in an authentic relation to this condition of overcrowding. While these ghosts may frighten us, appearing with stunning unexpectedness at the edges of what we can tolerate, they are nevertheless bound up with the political existence of the modern individual. Hence, taking responsibility for the tradition we have inherited seems to depend not just on citizenship, but also on remaining open to being displaced from the historical narrative that citizenship affirms. That is, it depends on dwelling properly in the haunted house of modern politics by acting in concert to bring those histories of violence and exclusion into appearance as part of the world we have inherited. In turning to the Haitian Revolution, we thus find that taking responsibility for the revolutionary tradition of the modern age seems to depend not only on citizenship, but also on political practices of historical memory that enable these memories of exclusion to appear as a part of the legacy that we have inherited and that we remain answerable to in modern political life.

These practices would serve to remind us that every affirmation of citizenship is, at the same time, an affirmation of our shared vulnerability to being displaced by the memories of exclusion that cannot be held together with the story we tell of ourselves. As an example, we might consider our interpretation of such founding documents as the United States Constitution. Whereas this document tends to be interpreted through aspects of it that are consistent with the narrative of American democracy, such as the Bill of Rights, we might consider interpreting it anew through those parts that disrupt this consistency, such as the Three-Fifths Compromise clause. ⁶⁸ This clause, which grew out of the legacy of American slavery, was ultimately repealed by the Fourteenth Amendment through the expansion of citizenship to the formerly enslaved in 1868. ⁶⁹ Yet, in spite of this, the memory of this legacy has failed to fade into oblivion, repeating itself in the racialized violence and exclusion that continues to haunt American political life today. Hence, interpreting the United States Constitution through this inconsistency might provide new ways of undertaking democratic practice and policy formation that are responsive to, rather than reticent of, the ghosts of the past. These ghosts are bound up with the legacy of the world we have inherited, and, in this case, written into the very document that preserves the founding moment of the political community. Hence, by allowing these ghosts to appear in the space of politics through practices like this one, it becomes possible to bring the shared reality of the world we have inherited into view. To recommend such practices is not to deny the importance of Arendt’s intervention in notions of citizenship inherited from the liberal tradition. Citizenship is an indispensable feature of the modern state, one that Arendt rightly recognizes as crucial for engendering a sense of belonging in political life. Yet, by coupling this with political practices of historical memory that acknowledge the limits of citizenship, it is possible to conceive of belonging even more expansively, not just in terms of the story we tell of ourselves, but also in terms of our shared responsibility to care for the haunted house we have inherited.