Abstract

Hannah Arendt was, among many other things, a migrant. This borderline experience had impact not only on her biography, but also on her work. In this chapter, I argue that although every migration story is situated in a specific individual, historical, and political context, on a deeper level there is a common phenomenal structure that enables us to recognize them as experiences of migration. I then suggest that Hannah Arendt's writings can help us to retrieve this structure. Arendt's political phenomenology offers a basis for mapping stories of migration in their plurality and opens possibilities to a better understanding of migration as a phenomenon. In this chapter I refer to Arendt's metaphors of darkness and light as guideposts for such understanding.