Denaturalizing Hannah Arendt and Claudia Jones: Statelessness, Citizenship and Racialization

Abstract

Claudia Jones (1915-1964) and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) were both illegalized by states seeking to shape populations through citizenship legislation and immigration control. The political thinking of each was informed by their respective experience of state violence and their belonging to a diaspora. In this chapter, I situate Arendt’s reflections on citizenship and statelessness in relation to the intellectual biography of Jones and the contexts in which she worked and wrote: the Harlem Renaissance, the Red Scare and the Notting Hill riots in Britain. I explore how the development of citizenship rights in the twentieth century was intertwined with race and colonialism in ways that Arendt neglected. In particular, the experiences and political thinking of Claudia Jones draw attention to how immigration control is not simply an instrument of exclusion but has been integral to the racial ordering of societies such as the USA and the UK.