Joseph-Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Otélé, Cameroon. He trained in history and philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris I) and received his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He is currently a senior professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbembe is considered one of the most influential African intellectuals today, with work that articulates African history, postcolonial theory, political philosophy, and cultural criticism. He writes in French; his principal works have been translated into English, Portuguese, German, and other languages.
Key Concepts
The Postcolony (On the Postcolony, 2001): This dense and original work analyzes the specific forms of power and subjectivation in postcolonial Africa. Mbembe rejects both the idealization of pre-colonial Africa and the complaint of permanent victimhood. The “postcolony” is a space of peculiar power relations: grotesque, erotic, violent, banal. The commandement (the power inherited from colonial administration) persists, but is lived, contested, and parodied by the population in complex ways. Mbembe uses Bakhtin’s categories (carnival, the grotesque) to analyze African politics.
Necropolitics (Public Culture, 2003; book Necropolitics, 2019): Mbembe’s most influential concept. Drawing on Foucault’s biopower and Agamben’s state of exception, Mbembe argues that understanding contemporary politics requires thinking not only about power as management of life, but about power as management of death. Necropolitics designates the sovereign capacity to define who may live and who must die. Mbembe shows that this logic is at the origin of the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism, and contemporary wars: certain populations are reduced to “death-worlds” — forms of social and political existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of living death. The concept has been widely adopted in studies of wars, borders, refugees, and “disposable” populations.
Critique of Black Reason (Critique of Black Reason, 2017): Mbembe historicizes the construction of the “Black race” as a central concept of European modernity. The “Negro” is not a natural identity but an invention of colonial modernity: the figure of the absolute Other, of the being without reason, of the disposable being, which allowed European humanism to define itself by exclusion. Mbembe examines how this invention structured slavery, colonialism, and contemporary racism — and how the “Black reason” (the logic that produces the Black person as an object of disposal) continues to operate in global capitalism. The work proposes a critique of modernity from the perspective of those excluded from its project.
The becoming-Black of the world: in Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe develops the provocative thesis that, in late capitalism, the condition of the “Black” — precariousness, disposability, surveillance, perpetual debt — tends to generalize. What was historically the specific condition of racialized populations is becoming the condition of growing portions of the world’s population. This thesis is controversial and has been widely debated.
Afropolitanism and thought from outside oneself: Mbembe proposes that Africa think from its own historical and geographical specificity, but without closing itself in identitarianism. Afropolitanism (a concept Mbembe uses differently from Taiye Selasi) designates a contemporary African sensibility that is simultaneously rooted and cosmopolitan, aware of multiple inheritances (African, Islamic, European) without essentializing them.
Critique of European humanism: in dialogue with Fanon and Derrida, Mbembe argues that European humanism was always selective: it proclaimed the universality of human rights while practicing slavery and colonialism. This contradiction is not an accident but a structure: European humanism needed the “non-human” — the Black person, the colonized — to constitute itself as universal.
Influenced by
- Frantz Fanon — colonial pathology, decolonizing violence
- Michel Foucault — biopower, genealogy, discourse
- Giorgio Agamben — state of exception, bare life
- Jacques Derrida — deconstruction, hospitality, the other
- Hannah Arendt — origins of totalitarianism, violence
- Walter Benjamin — messianic time, history
- Mikhail Bakhtin — carnival, grotesque
Influenced
- Contemporary postcolonial and decolonial studies
- African critical theory (South Africa, Cameroon, Senegal)
- Political analysis of African wars and conflicts
- Debates on necropolitics and disposable populations
- Studies of borders, refugees, migrations
Works
Afriques indociles (1988); La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1996); On the Postcolony (2001); Necropolitics (essay, 2003; book, 2019); Critique of Black Reason (2017); Brutalism (2024).
See also
African Philosophy Twentieth-Century Philosophy