Tuesday, May 13, 20254:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Bunche Hall, Rm 10383
The Center for European and Russian Studies invites you to a book talk by David Kim, Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and Associate Vice Provost of the International Institute, in conversation with Samuel Moyn, Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, and Yogita Goyal, Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA.
Kim's publication Arendt's Solidarity: Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World was published in October 2024. (Stanford University Press). This discussion will take place in Bunche Hall, Room 10383 on May 13, 2025 at 4PM PST. Registration is required.
About the Talk
Hannah Arendt's work inspires many to stand in solidarity against authoritarianism, racial or gender-based violence, climate change, and right-wing populism. But what if a careful analysis of her oeuvre reveals a darker side to this intellectual legacy? What if solidarity, as she conceives of it, is not oriented toward equality, freedom, or justice for all, but creates a barrier to intersectional coalition building?
In Arendt's Solidarity, David D. Kim illuminates Arendt's lifelong struggle with this deceptively straightforward yet divisive concept. Drawing upon her publications, unpublished documents, private letters, radio and television interviews, newspaper clippings, and archival marginalia, Kim examines how Arendt refutes solidarity as an effective political force against anti-Semitism, racial injustice, or social inequality. As Kim reveals, this conceptual conundrum follows the arc of Arendt's forced migration across the Atlantic and is directly related to every major concern of hers: Christian neighborly love, friendship, Jewish assimilation, Zionism, National Socialism, the American republic, Black Power, revolution, violence, and the human world. Kim places these thoughts in dialogue with dissenting voices, such as Thomas Mann, Gershom Scholem, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, James Forman, and Ralph Ellison. The result is a full-scale reinterpretation of Arendt's oeuvre.
About the Speaker
David D. Kim is Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies and Associate Vice Provost of the International Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Cosmopolitan Parables: Trauma and Responsibility in Contemporary Germany (2017).
Samuel Moyn is the Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University, where he also serves as head of Grace Hopper College. Trained in modern European intellectual history, he works on political and legal thought in modern times and on constitutional and international law in historical and current perspective. His most recent book is Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (Yale University Press, 2023), based on the Carlyle Lectures in the History of Political Thought at the University of Oxford.
Yogita Goyal is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and the author of two monographs: Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA.
Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies