Critique of Black Reason (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)

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. 

• In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• On the Postcolony (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)
• Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture)
• Alienation and Freedom
• Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
• The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
• The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)
• In The Break: The Aesthetics Of The Black Radical Tradition
• The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation (The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures)