Critique of Black Reason by Achille Mbembe (review)

Achille Mbembe’s Critique of Black Reason, translated from French with an insightful introduction by eminent historian Laurent DuBois, is a philosophical study of the meaning of Blackness within its historical development. It examines race as a biological and social phenomenon constructed by, within, and for the benefit of western capitalist traditions. Mbembe asserts the concept’s failure to function as an authentic description of humanity in contemporary society. He draws upon a discourse developed in critical race theory using literary and social forms of thought and historical and political analysis of market economies. Mbembe argues that from the time of the western expansion of the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, the mercantilist labor and extractive requirements of Europe’s plantation economies and the global colonization and apartheid that followed created and then nurtured the concept of race within the context of mercantilist labor and extractive industries. From these origins, the “subaltern” idea of Blackness was constructed, as was the associated meaning of African as the “other,” a degraded form of humanity (35, 37, 45). Thus, Africa and Blackness, Mbembe reasons, today represents “two notions” that “took shape together” during a “long historical process aimed at producing racial subjects” (38).

Mbembe’s range of thought is not limited to his critique of global capitalism and the ideas about racial difference that he argues must be attributed to its development. His focus in this work includes the intellectual productions that emerged in response to this development, including what he calls the “politics of Africanity,” understood as “an exposé of humanity” (87). While the objective of this “black discourse” may be “a final universal destination,” its “redeployment of cultural difference,” Mbembe argues, problematically “depends upon a racial subject” (88). “This approach, taken up by ideological currents linked to progressivism and radicalism” established “a quasi-identity between race and geography” that was immediately followed by “a cultural identity that flowed from the relationship between the two terms” (91). As a result, “racial authenticity and territoriality were combined, and in such conditions Africa became the land of the Blacks” (91).

While Mbembe has read broadly from a variety of sources and across several disciplines, intellectual traditions, and languages to construct his multilayered analysis over time, geography, and cultures, his principle arguments draw heavily upon ideas of Franz Fanon, such as the idea of whiteness constructed over time; the ideas in the poetry of Negritude that Aimé Césaire considered “a miraculous weapon”; and the critical insights of Michel Foucault, who concluded that “the modern state can scarcely function without becoming involved with racism” (88).

Perhaps the most intellectually challenging chapter is chapter 5, “Requiem for a Slave,” which Mbembe sees as the “foundation for the entire book.” In it, he is concerned with the “status of the black slave during the first era of capitalism,” when the black man appears as “the ghost of modernity” and the slave trade as the “nocturnal face of capitalism.” Mbembe writes about the “fetish of power” employing works of fiction such as Somi Labou Tansi’s Life and a Half, which examines the “phenomenon of multiplicity and surplus” that Mbembe calls the “central dimension of nocturnal economy”—turning human beings into commodities (130). Here Mbembe describes a power that “when necessary knows how to take on animal power.” As a result of the exercise of this animal power, “saucy scraps of flesh hung in the place of lips” and eyes emerge out of “two slits of black light from two larger shadowy holes” forming a “body into meat” (134–135).

To be sure, Mbembe’s work is not an easy read, but for thoughtful readers it is an important one. This book provides important insights into the critical discourse of race and racial matters in the twenty-first century and will be useful for critical race theorists, those who read and write literary and social criticism, and students of political economy concerned with the function of law and ethics and their role...