Full Description
In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness-from the Atlantic slave trade to the present-to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.
Contents
Translator's Introduction ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction. The Becoming Black of the World 1
1. The Subject of Race 10
2. The Well of Fantasies 38
3. Difference and Self-Determination 78
4. The Little Secret 103
5. Requiem for the Slave 129
6. The Clinic of the Subject 131
Epilogue. There Is Only One World 179
Notes 185
Index 209
