Achille Mbembe – cancelled

”Every age has a handful of intellectuals who restore the adventure of thought. Today, I would argue that no one embodies this sense of daring stronger than Achille Mbembe […] His self–imposed mission is to move beyond the colonial discourse, to establish a language which can conceptually grasp current forms of oppression and hope in Africa as well as elsewhere. This development can be followed in a long series of articles in the journal Public Culture. In ”African Modes of Self-Writing” (2002), ”Necropolitics” (2003) and ”Aesthetics of Superfluity” (2004) he breaks with the Hegelian tradition that establishes, in negative terms, Africa as an object of knowledge set apart from humanity and modernity. In these essays Africa is no longer located outside the world but very much in the world, a part of the world. No one has with the same level of ambition read the Jewish, German and African philosophical traditions with and against each other, on the basis of their originally marginal position in relation to modernity.”

This is how Stefan Helgesson presented Achille Mbembe in an introduction to a Swedish translation of a chapter from On the postcolony, published in the journal Glänta 3/2005.

Achille Mbembe is a political scientist with a long research career behind him. Originally from Cameroon he received his doctorate in Paris 1989 and has since worked in a number of universities in the USA as well as Senegal. Today he is tied to the research institute WISER and Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. His book On the Postcolony from 2001 has made a lasting impression on the postcolonial discussion. Among his notable later books is Sortir de la grand nuit: essai sur l’Afrique décolonsiée from 2010. He was also one of the contributors of the Chimurenga Chronic – a journal in the form of a three hundred page weekly newspaper dated May 2008 yet released in October 2011– a unique edition of a fictive newspaper which travels back in time to reinvent the present. Glänta participated as the only non-African editors of the newspaper.

The lecture is presented in partnership with Glänta.