Richard H. King, Arendt and America

Excerpt

In our current age of emergent Trumpism, it has become easy for some to ignore the fact that America is and has always been a nation of immigrants, émigrés, and refugees. Each one has brought pieces of home with them – ways of doing, ways of seeing, ways of thinking, and ways of speaking. Thus, the United States has been enriched and transformed by its transplants, making the answer to the age-old question “what is an American” progressively more complicated. American society and culture are marked by their rich hybridity, and it is precisely the capaciousness of American pluralism that has greeted America‘s new arrivals. The immigrant, the émigré, and the refugee have the ability to expand the concept of America, while they simultaneously possess the capability to embrace and become a part of this widening notion of America. Hannah Arendt, according to her transatlantic biographer (Richard King), discovered this during her own experience in the New World, and it was one of the things that caused her to value it so much more than the Old World. …