Frantz Fanon and the Politics of Viscerality

Achille Mbembe on Fanon, Violence and Sartre's introduction to Les Damnés de la Terre

Lewis Gordon, Nigel Gibson and Achille Mbembe Speak on Fanon in Johannesburg

Achille Mbembe on The State of South African Political Life

Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe, Africa is a Country

In these times of urgency, when weak and lazy minds would like us to oppose “thought” to “direct action”; and when, precisely because of this propensity for “thoughtless action”, everything is framed in the nihilistic terms of power for the sake of power  – in such times what follows might mistakenly be construed as contemptuous.

Language Knowledge and Decolonizing the University

Achille Mbember: Decolonizing the University. What Now?

Achille Mbembe: The value of Africa’s aesthetics

Achille Mbembe, Mail & Guardian

I wrote most of On the Postcolony at night. It was in the early 1990s, as the deep shadow of Afro-Marxism was receding. Then, it seemed as if the study of Africa was caught in a dramatic analytical gridlock. Many scholars were peddling increasingly unhelpful maps of the present at the very moment that new dramas were taking shape.

As the crisis in the social sciences was intensifying, innovative trends, even a new kind of thinking, were emerging in fields as disparate as design, fiction, fashion, painting, dance and the domain of aesthetics in general. In all these disciplines of the imagination, something of a reconciliation between so-called African identity and a certain idea of worldliness, if not cosmopolitanism, was in the making.

Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive

Achille Mbembe - Decolonizing Knowledge and the Question of the Archive by TigersEye99

Achille Mbembe in Conversation with Rhodes Must Fall

Achille Mbembe: Decolonizing The University

Achille Mbembe writes about Xenophobic South Africa

Achille Mbembe, Africa is a Country

“Afrophobia”? “Xenophobia”? “Black on black racism”? A “darker” as you can get hacking a “foreigner” under the pretext of his being too dark — self hate par excellence? Of course all of that at once! Yesterday I asked a taxi driver: “why do they need to kill these “foreigners” in this manner?”. His response: “because under Apartheid, fire was the only weapon we Blacks had. We did not have ammunitions, guns and the likes. With fire we could make petrol bombs and throw them at the enemy from a safe distance”. Today there is no need for distance any longer. To kill “these foreigners”, we need to be as close as possible to their body which we then set in flames or dissect, each blow opening a huge wound that can never be healed. Or if it is healed at all, it must leave on “these foreigners” the kinds of scars that can never be erased.

Transcending Myth: A Reading of Achille Mbembe’s 'On the Postcolony'

by Paddy O’Halloran

‘And how can one live in death, be already dead, while being-there—while having not necessarily left the world or being part of the spectre—and when the shadow that overhangs existence has not disappeared, but on the contrary weights ever more heavily?’ – Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (2001, 201).

In a famous passage of The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon describes the dreams of colonized people.  The dreams are of ‘muscular prowess’, of going ‘beyond certain limits’: ‘I dream’, Fanon writes, ‘that I burst out laughing, that I span a river in one stride […]. During the period of colonization, the native [le colonisé] never stops achieving his [sic] freedom from nine in the evening until six in the morning’ ([1961] 1963, 52).  These are dreams which challenge, in the subconscious world, unfettered from reality, the limitations of the coerced reality of colonization.  They are dreams which the dreamers wish to make real, desiring to mimic the excess of action of their nightly fictions in waking life.  Fanon, later, imagining an uprising of the ‘slaves’ writes: ‘We were running like madmen; shots rang out . . . we were striking [….] Blood and sweat cooled and refreshed us’ and, as they burned the structures of the colonizers, ‘the flames flickered sweetly on our cheeks’ (1963, 88).

Class, race and the new native

Achille Mbembe, Mail & Guardian

The single most important transformation brought about by the end of apartheid was an acceleration in turning South African society from a society of control into a society of consumption. This shift has been the main post-apartheid event. More than any other, it underpins South Africa’s contemporary dynamics of class, race, gender and ethnicity.

It is the conflation of the form and substance of democracy and citizenship with the rule of consumption that has mistakenly been given the name of a transition to democracy.

Footnotes on the off-shore city

Achille Mbembe, Johannesburg Workshop in Theory & Criticism

 

At the start of the 21st century, we witness a renewed interest in the idea of the African future. Gradually, older senses of time and space based on linear notions of development and progress are being replaced by newer senses of time founded on liquidity and flows. Africa's future is increasingly thought of as open, full of possibility and potentiality, even as pliant. This new cultural and political sense of time is constructed in a number of registers, from the economic to the fictional. It acknowledges that things are complex. And yet, in its emphasis on un-actualized possibilities and would-be worlds, it also relies on open narrative models. Critical in this regard is the study of emergent orders, forms of self-organization, small ruptures, "tipping points" that may lead to deep alterations of the direction the Continent takes.

Achille Mbembe Interviewed by Mikaela Erskog, 8 August 2014

Considering the political project within Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony and “African Modes of Self Writing”

[Unless quoting from a particular text, quotation marks are used to indicate air quotes. Information within square brackets provides further context, in cases where for example Prof Mbembe referred to an idea that was discussed in the Master classes on 7 and 8 August.]

Erskog: Is there a particular notion or assumption that lies at the foundation of your work/thinking? (As, from what I have read, I would consider your conception of “subjectivity as time” (Mbembe, 2002:242) as the underlying concept towards rethinking African theorization.)

Achille Mbembe: Non-racialism and the New Native Question in South Africa

Gaza vigil - Rhodes University 8/8/2014

Grahamstown Vigil for Gaza

Achille Mbembe at the Grahamstown Vigil for Gaza

Prof Mbembe to deliver a public lecture on Non-racialism

http://www.ru.ac.za/latestnews/profmbembetodeliverapubliclectureonnon-racialism.html

The Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University (UHURU) will host one of South Africa’s most potent contributors to the analysis of modern politics, Prof Achille Mbembe. He will be delivering a public lecture on Wednesday (6 August 2014) entitled: "Non-racialism and the New Native Question in South Africa"

“Prof Mbembe is one of the few intellectuals in South Africa who is deeply familiar with modern social theory and philosophy, particularly with what is termed ‘continental philosophy’.  He was educated in France and publishes regularly in that country,” said the Director of UHURU, Prof Michael Neocosmos.

“Moreover he is precisely concerned with Africa, not as the place of ‘the other’, but as our own place with all its problems and all its extraordinary history and people.  Who better to begin the new term under the auspices of UHURU?,” he added.

Eusebius McKaizer Interviews Achille Mbembe on his article on the EFF