In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt warns that isolating individuals and groups renders them politically impotent, arguing that segregation is a fertile ground for totalitarianism. Authoritarianism sows distrust by pitting vulnerable groups against each other, it robs them of agency and prevents them from acting together. In today’s “attention economy,” this manifests as minorities compete against each other for visibility, risking an inversion of the feminist principle “the personal is political” to “only the personal is political”. This approach reduces politics to self-interest, both individual and collective.
As an antidote to neoliberal “divide and rule” tactics, it is urgent to build alliances by focusing on the intertextuality of our struggles. Drawing on Arendt’s political understanding of friendship, Nikita Dhawan and Maria do Mar Castro Varela will explore the challenges of building coalitions across distinct vulnerabilities and agencies. They argue that the counterforce to tyranny and terror is to nurture alliances across difference, affinities, and shared experiences creating collectivities where we can listen to each other and find our own voices.
About the speakers
Nikita Dhawan holds the Chair in Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Technical University Dresden. Her research and teaching focuses on global justice, human rights, democracy and decolonization. She received the Käthe Leichter Award in 2017 for outstanding achievements in the pursuit of women's and gender studies and in support of the women's movement and the achievement of gender equality. Selected publications include: Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007); Reimagining the State: Theoretical Challenges and Transformative Possibilities (ed., 2019); Rescuing the Enlightenment from the Europeans: Critical Theories of Decolonization (forthcoming, Duke University Press). In 2023, she was awarded the Gerda Henkel Visiting Professorship at Stanford University and the Thomas Mann Fellowship, Los Angeles.
María do Mar Castro Varela is Professor of Education and Social Work at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences in Berlin, with a focus on gender studies. She holds a double degree in Psychology and Education and a PhD in Political Science. She was Thomas Mann House Fellow in Los Angeles (2023), Sir Peter Ustinov Visiting Professor at the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna (2021/2022), and Senior Fellow at the Institute for the Science of Man (IWM) in Vienna (2016). Her current research focuses on issues of ethics, protest, emancipation, and knowledge production. Selected publications (in German) include: Friendship. Triad of a Political Practice (2023), Post/pandemic Life: A New Theory of Fragility (2021), Untimely Utopias. Migrant Women Between Self-Invention and Learned Hope (2007).
Dr Cissie Fu (AB Harvard; MSt, MSc, DPhil Oxford) is a political theorist. Born in Hong Kong, Cissie taught and performed across Asia, Europe, UK, and the Americas. She joined University of the Arts Singapore in 2022 as Associate Professor and Head of the McNally School of Fine Arts at LASALLE College of the Arts, after having served as Dean of the Faculty of Culture + Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada. Cissie’s research interests in political aesthetics and decolonial action inform her approach to institution-building as a creative, critical, and communal cultural practice.
