Creolizing Hannah Arendt - (Creolizing the Canon) by Marilyn Nissim-Sabat & Jane Anna Gordon & Neil Roberts (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Creolizing Hannah Arendt is the first book to explore the implications of creolizing Hannah Arendt (1906-75) and thinking for: action, liberation, freedom, power, democracy, identity, racism, prejudice, totalitarianism, immigration, judgment, revolution, decolonial politics, the human, and the modern traditions of Caribbean political thought, Africana philosophy, and existential phenomenology.
Contributors include: Cristina Beltrán, Roger Berkowitz, Angélica Maria Bernal, Robert Eaglestone, Stephen Nathan Haymes, Paget Henry, Thomas Meagher, Dana Francisco Miranda, Marilyn Nissim-Sabat, Niklas Plaetzer, Neil Roberts.

Review Quotes

"Sheds new light on a hugely influential twentieth-century political theorist. Skillfully curated by Marilyn Nissim-Sabat and Neil Roberts . . . Creolizing Hannah Arendt is well worth engaging. It will not be solely of interest to those working on Arendt, as it takes up vital questions about the future of settler colonial polities, the paradoxes of constitutional founding, and ways of effectively waging antiracist struggle, among many other issues." --Juliet Hooker, New West Indian Guide (April, 2026)

"Creolizing Hannah Arendt is a sophisticated collection of essays that brings forth Hannah Arendt's thinking about freedom and individuals while also integrating other theorists who have interpreted Arendt's work over the last century." --New Books Network

"This wide-ranging volume, at once reverent and critical, brings Hannah Arendt, that most European of political theorists, into a new world. The breadth and depth of this volume and this series is extraordinary. Once again, political thought is made new by meeting out of bounds." --Anne Norton, Stacey and Henry Jackon President's Distinguished Professor, University of Pennsylvania

"This extraordinary collection of essays not only throws new light on Arendt's conceptions of race and color, prejudice, migrants' political actions, but also fruitfully reappropriates Arendt's reflections on Jewish identity for creating a dialogue with thinkers of the Global South such as Edouard Glissant and Sylvia Wynter." --Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor Emerita of Philosophy and Political Science, Yale University, senior research fellow, Columbia Law School

"Marilyn Nissim-Sabat and Neil Roberts have done us all a great service in assembling this extraordinary group of scholars with the task of creolizing Hannah Arendt's monumental thought. Thinking through, with, and beyond Arendt, they bring freshness to the many pearls of wisdom she offered in her love for humanity, and they offer a model of creolizing thinking in which critique and generosity meet in the spirit of understanding. As some of these authors also conversed with Arendt, the insights they offer into her courage spirit, kind heart, and powerful mind are gifts for generation of readers to come. Creolizing Hannah Arendt is a much-needed contribution to the ongoing task of shifting the geography of reason." --Lewis R. Gordon, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Global Affairs, University of Connecticut

About the Author

Marilyn Nissim-Sabat is professor emeritus of philosophy at Lewis University and the author of Neither Victim Nor Survivor. She is presently working on a book to be titled Arendt and Husserl: Phenomenology, Totalitarianism, and the Banality of Evil. Nissim-Sabat has published book chapters on the work of thinkers including Lewis Gordon, Richard Wright, and Herman Melville as well as written numerous book reviews and articles on philosophy and psychoanalysis.
Neil Roberts is John B. McCoy and John T. McCoy professor of Africana studies, political theory, and the philosophy of religion at Williams College, where he also serves as associate dean of the faculty. He has published widely on modern and contemporary political theory, politics in literature, and theories of freedom. His books include Freedom as Marronage and A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass. How to Live Free in an Age of Pessimism is his next monograph.