Bibliographical Essay

Hannah Arendt (1906-75) wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in English, and the original title was The Burden of Our Time (London: Secker & Warburg, 1951). She later rewrote the book in her native German (Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft, [Elements and Origins of Total Rule] (Munich: Piper, 2013 [1955]).

A large field of scholarship surrounds Arendt. The following sources are useful for reading Origins. Margaret Canovan, The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt, 1974) remains a good introduction to Origins. Canovan's Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) offers a valuable rereading of Arendt based on unpublished papers. See also the useful chapters in Dana Villa (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Richard H. King and Dan Stone (eds.), Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race, and Genocide (New York: Berghahn, 2007). One of the best review essays is Dan Stone, ‘Defending the Plural: Hannah Arendt and Genocide Studies', New Formations 71 (2011), 46-57. Those seeing Walter Benjamin's influence on Arendt include Norma Claire Moruzzi, Speaking through the Mask: Hannah Arendt and the Politics of Social Identity (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000). Karuna Mantena offers postcolonial reflections on Origins in ‘Genealogies of Catastrophe', in Seyla Benhabib (ed.), Politics in Dark Times: Encounters with Hannah Arendt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 83-112. Michael Rothberg's Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in an Age of Decolonization (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) provides an astute reading of Origins, which puts it into dialogue with negritude writer Aime Cesaire.

Scholars critical of Arendt on questions of race and prejudice include: Jimmy Casas Klausen, ‘Hannah Arendt's Antiprimitivism', Political Theory 38.3 (2010), 394-423; Anne Norton, ‘Heart of Darkness: Africa and African Americans in the Writings of Hannah Arendt', in Bonnie Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), pp. 247-61; Shiraz Dossa, ‘Human Status and Politics: Hannah Arendt on the Holocaust', Canadian Journal of Political Science 13.2 (1980), 309-23. Gail Presbey takes up Arendt's understanding of Africa in ‘Critic of Boers or Africans? Arendt's Treatment of South Africa in The Origins of Totalitarianism', in Postcolonial African Philosophy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 162-80. Finally, George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Oxford: Robertson, 1983) defends Arendt's treatment of Africans and Boers.

Those using Arendt to understand postcolonial questions include Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Achille Mbembe reads colonial violence through the perspectives offered by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who is himself a close if controversial reader of Arendt; see Mbembe, ‘Necropolitics', Public Culture 15.1 (2003), 11-40.

Among those whom Arendt inspired to read Nazism through imperialism, Enzo Traverso's Origins of Nazi Violence, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: New Press, 2003) nicely negotiates away from a diffusionist ‘boomerang thesis'. The cultural links between Nazism and imperialism are explored in Jared Poley, Decolonization in Germany: Weimar Narratives of Colonial Loss and Foreign Occupation (Berne: Lang, 2005). Nearly all of the other major works in this field are noted in chapter 5 of Dan Stone's Histories of the Holocaust (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), with the exception of Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison.

Within African studies, recent studies of colonialism and imperialism stressing its mutually transformative effects include Michelle R. Moyd, Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014) and Bruce S. Hall, Race in Muslim West Africa, 1600-1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). A previous generation looking at accommodation between Africans and Europeans is represented by David Robinson, Paths of Accommodation: Muslim Societies and French Colonial Authorities in Senegal and Mauritania, 1880-1920 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000) and Julia A. Clancy-Smith, Rebel and Saint: Muslim Notables, Populist Protest, Colonial Encounters (Algeria and Tunisia, 1800-1904) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). A rereading of British indirect rule is provided in Moses E. Ochonu, Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014). Violence in the colonial era is typically dealt with by military historians of Africa such as Richard J. Reid, Warfare in African History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Timothy J. Stapleton, A Military History of Africa, vol. ii, The Colonial Period: From the Scramble for Africa to the Algerian Independence War (ca.