"Us first": The Making of Migrants as Superfluous Human Beings

This article defends the relevance of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) for understanding some contemporary political phenomena, in particular, the new migrations caused by political violence, economic dispossession and ecological degradation, as well as the xenophobic react...

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Autor principal: Campillo Meseguer, Antonio
Formato: Artículo revista
Lenguaje:Español
Publicado: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Centro de Investigaciones de la Facultad de Filosofía y Humanidades. 2022
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Acceso en línea:https://revistas.unc.edu.ar/index.php/pescadoradeperlas/article/view/36576
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Sumario:This article defends the relevance of Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) for understanding some contemporary political phenomena, in particular, the new migrations caused by political violence, economic dispossession and ecological degradation, as well as the xenophobic reactions of receiving countries, whose ultra-nationalist policies (“Us first”) have produced the figure of the migrant as a “superfluous” human being. After a brief summary of Arendt's work and its four successive editions, we review some of the interpretations it has given rise to over the last seventy years. The prophetic theses of chapter 9 on the “new nation of the stateless people”, expropriated and uprooted people, are then recovered and used to understand contemporary migrations and the rise of the neo-fascist ultra-right, in the context of neoliberal capitalism, neo-Westphalian geopolitics and the global ecological crisis.