Achille Mbembe | |
|---|---|
 Mbembe in 2015 | |
| Born | Joseph-Achille Mbembe (1957-07-27)July 27, 1957 (age 68) |
| Spouse | Sarah Nuttall |
| Awards | Geschwister-Scholl-Preis |
| Academic background | |
| Alma mater | Sorbonne Instituts d'études politiques |
| Influences | Jean-Marc Ela,Fabien Eboussi Boulaga,Frantz Fanon,Michel Foucault,Bernard Stiegler,Hannah Arendt |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | University of the Witwatersrand,Duke University |
| Main interests | History,political science |
| Notable ideas | Necropolitics |
Joseph-Achille Mbembe (/əmˈbɛmbeɪ/; born 1957) is aCameroonian historian and political theorist who is a research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at theUniversity of the Witwatersrand. He is well known for his writings on colonialism and its consequences and is a leading figure in new wave Frenchcritical theory.[1][2]
Mbembe was born nearOtélé inCameroon in 1957. He obtained hisPh.D. in history at theUniversity of Sorbonne in Paris, France, in 1989. He subsequently obtained aD.E.A. in political science at theInstituts d'études politiques in the same city. He has held appointments atColumbia University in New York,Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.,University of Pennsylvania,University of California, Berkeley,Yale University,Duke University andCouncil for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) inDakar,Senegal.[2]
Mbembe was assistant professor of history at Columbia University, New York, from 1988 to 1991, a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, executive director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting professor at Yale University in 2003.[3] He was a research professor in history and politics atHarvard University'sW. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute.[4] In 2020 Mbembe delivered the presidential lecture in the Humanities atStanford University.[5]
Mbembe has written extensively on African history and politics, includingLa naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris: Karthala, 1996).[6]On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research Foundation.[3]
Mbembe is currently a member of the staff at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at theUniversity of the Witwatersrand inJohannesburg, South Africa,[1] and has an annual visiting appointment at theFranklin Humanities Institute atDuke University.[7]
He is a contributing editor to the scholarly journalPublic Culture.[8][9]
Mbembe's main research topics areAfrican history,postcolonial studies andpolitics andsocial science. Although he is called a postcolonial theorist, namely due to the title of his first English book, he has thoroughly rejected this label more recently,[10] because he sees his project as one of both acceptance and transcendence of difference, rather than of return to an original, marginal, non-metropolitan homeland.
Mbembe's most important works are:Les jeunes et l'ordre politique en Afrique noire (1985);[11]La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1920–1960);[12]Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (1996);[13]De la postcolonie. Essai sur l'imagination politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine (On the Postcolony) (2000);[14]Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique décolonisée (2010);[15]Critique de la raison nègre (2013).[16]
His central workOn the Postcolony was translated into English and released byUniversity of California Press in 2001.[14] This influential work has also been republished in an African edition by Wits University Press and contains a new preface by Achille Mbembe. In this text, Mbembe argues that academic and popular discourse on Africa gets caught within various cliches tied to Western fantasies and fears.[17] FollowingFrantz Fanon andSigmund Freud, Mbembe holds that this depiction is not a reflection of an authentic Africa but an unconscious projection tied to guilt, disavowal, and the compulsion to repeat. LikeJames Ferguson,V.Y. Mudimbe, and others, Mbembe interprets Africa not as a defined, isolated place but as a fraught relationship between itself and the rest of the world which plays out simultaneously on political, psychic, semiotic, and sexual levels.
Mbembe claims thatMichel Foucault's concept ofbiopower – as an assemblage of disciplinary power andbiopolitics – is no longer sufficient to explain these contemporary forms of subjugation. To the insights of Foucault regarding the notions of sovereign power and biopower, Mbembe adds the concept ofnecropolitics, which goes beyond merely "inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses".[18] Discussing the examples of Palestine, Africa, and Kosovo, Mbembe shows how the power of sovereignty now becomes enacted through the creation of zones of death where death becomes the ultimate exercise of domination and the primary form of resistance.[19]
He has also examinedJohannesburg as a metropolitan city and the work ofFrantz Fanon.[1]
Achille Mbembe denounces the lack of democracy in Africa, and calls for the end of the CFA franc, and of French military bases in Africa, he highlights the loss of French influence in Africa.[20]
In May 2019 theGerman Parliament passed a resolution branding theBDS movementantisemitic. In addition allGerman states were advised to deny public funding for events or people supportive of that movement.[21] In early 2020, the Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life and the fight against antisemitism,Felix Klein, called for the cancellation of a keynote address by Mbembe scheduled to be delivered on 14 August that summer at theRuhrtriennale. He claimed Mbembe had "relativised the Holocaust and denied Israel's right to exist". The invitation was withdrawn, and the festival itself was cancelled due to theCOVID-19 pandemic.[22][21]
The false evidence for this charge was based on comments Mbembe made in two books where hedrew parallels between the separatist policies deployed in theIsraeli occupation of thePalestinian territories and South Africa under Apartheid.[23][a][24] Mbembe was supported by groups of Israeli and Jewish academics, including some prominent German Holocaust scholars. Concerns were raised over what some argued was a "weaponization of antisemitism",[23] and, later that year, in December, representatives of 32 prominent cultural institutions issued a declaration both rejecting the BDS movement and, at the same time, warning that, rather than reining in antisemitism, the resolution posed dangers tofreedom of speech.[b][22] In response,Monika Grütters, Germany's parliamentary state secretary for culture, stated that cultural institutions walk a tightrope between artistic freedoms and socially acceptable ideas, and that anti-Semitism was a redline issue.[21]
In 2018, Mbembe was involved in the academic boycott of an Israeli professor, Shifra Sagy.[25][26] Sagy, a psychology professor atBen-Gurion University, was eventually disinvited from a conference atStellenbosch University in South Africa after a boycott led by Mbembe and his colleague and wifeSarah Nuttall.[27][28]
In 2010 and 2015, Mbembe signed petitions endorsing theacademic boycott of Israel.[29][30]
Mbembe is married toSarah Nuttall, who is professor of literary and cultural studies and director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at theUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. They have written several texts together and have two children.[31]
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