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.

Translator's Introduction  ix
Acknowledgments  xvii
Introduction. The Becoming Black of the World  1
1. The Subject of Race  10
2. The Well of Fantasies  38
3. Difference and Self-Determination  78
4. The Little Secret  103
5. Requiem for the Slave  129
6. The Clinic of the Subject  131
Epilogue. There Is Only One World  179
Notes  185
Index 209