Achille Mbembe Research Articles

‘Time becomes memory, and memory becomes the ditch in which we drown’: rethinking modes of knowing the past in Ian McGuire’s The Abstainer (2020)

ABSTRACT This article argues that historical novels play a crucial part in rethinking contemporary modes of knowing the past. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics and Judith Butler’s thoughts on precarious life, this article elucidates the close relationship between modes of knowing the past and progressive politics in the present, crystallised in the political concept of grievability. National histories paint the picture of ‘a past without strangers’, in the terms of Achille Mbembe, creating narrow circles of grievability which do not challenge established solidarities and structures of political inequalities in the present. This article goes on to demonstrate that historical novels may subvert this nationalist fantasy through the portrayal of liminal characters in liminal spaces. Ian McGuire’s The Abstainer (2020), set in an intra-European colonial context, continually breaks the frame of what is considered a grievable life by criticising a mode of knowing the past that prioritises mourning the dead over caring for the needs of the living in the present. In conclusion, this article argues that The Abstainer ultimately proposes a radical and paradoxical mode of knowing the past: It urges us to recognise that commemoration of the dead may become an obsessions and justification for acts of violence, and encourages us to rethink not just what histories we tell, but also how we tell them.

Ontology of Necropolitical Governance

The world witnessed one of the most devastating ethnic group exoduses in Southeast Asia in August 2017, with the Rohingya at its core. Enduring generations of repression, rampant sexual assault, and organized devastation implemented by the government of Myanmar, many Rohingya people were forced to flee to adjacent Bangladesh to seek safety. Despite being an integral aspect of Myanmar’s past, the state denies the Rohingya people their rights to citizenship. This omission from citizenship perpetuates their exclusion from Myanmar’s body politic.Employing Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, this paper uses Habiburahman’s memoir, First, They Erased Our Name: A Rohingya Speaks, to examine how the state of Myanmar has been instrumental in orchestrating a systematic marginalization of the Rohingya. This process has reduced them to what Agamben terms as “bare life,” thereby ascribing them to a position of what Judith Butler terms as precarity. Utilizing Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, this article theorizes how the state abuses the precarious position of the Rohingya by creating “death worlds,” relegating them to the position of “the living dead,” ultimately culminating in the teleological inevitability of genocide.

Between Waste Studies and Postcolonial Theory: Wasted Lives, Necropolitics, and Environmental (In)Justice in Marcos Herrera’s La Mitad Mejor

ABSTRACT: This essay bridges a gap between Waste Theory, Postcolonial Studies, and Environmental Justice through a new reading of Marcos Herrera’s La mitad mejor (2009). Set in Buenos Aires’ clandestine underworld, the narrative stages acts of extreme cruelty that reduce its marginalized characters to ‘wasted lives’ (Zygmunt Bauman), ‘living dead’ (Achille Mbembe), and ‘less than human beings’ (Maria Lugones). Attending to Herrera’s ‘unplots’, racialized ‘uncharacters’, and wasted settings, I argue that violence flows deeper than these spectacular acts, and read La mitad mejor as a fictionalized response to Rob Nixon’s pressing question: how to narrate the ‘slow violence’ of environmental injustice.

Thinking through Decolonial Pedagogies

Developed through the Decolonization and the Study of Religion Workshop Series, this paper will explore some concerns about decolonizing pedagogy in theory, practice, and the classroom. Weaving insights from a set of important thinkers in the field – like Achille Mbembe, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Eve Tuck and Ruben A. Gaztambide-Fernandez, Walter Mignolo and Catherine Walsh, Anabal Quijano, and Paulette Regan – the aim of the paper is to introduce some questions for pedagogues to think about in relation to the question of decolonizing pedagogies and to some of the discussions had at the workshop. The paper explores topics and discussions about structural critiques of the university, material versus epistemic analyses of decolonization, learning and unlearning as a central method in decolonization, the importance of how to make space for African and Indigenous Traditional Knowledges, and thinking about how to unpack power relations in the classroom and curriculum. The paper is more concerned with opening dialogue and making space for insights than an attempt to answer definitively questions of decolonization and pedagogy.

The limits of White hospitality in Marie Darrieussecq’s La Mer à l’envers

In Necropolitics (2019), migratory politics figure as one of the primary manifestations of the enmity Achille Mbembe considers characteristic of our time. It is within this context that we will discuss Marie Darrieussecq’s novel, La Mer à l’envers (2019), in order to probe the potential of the French protagonist’s relationship with a Nigerien migrant as a path towards founding “a relation with others based on the reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability and finitude” (Mbembe 3). The novel explores the possibilities and limits of hospitality through the chance meeting between a White, middle-aged French woman, Rose, and a teenage Nigerien migrant, Younès, who is brought aboard her cruise ship after the shipwreck of his vessel. The author does not shy away from ambivalence as she interrogates the affective and cognitive difficulties felt by the non-exemplary French woman. By examining the conditions of hospitality presented by Darrieussecq and the role of the author-protagonist-readership trio’s Whiteness, we will discern the novel’s potential for illuminating a new way of relating to one another, beyond the projection of fears and the violence of borderization.

“We were fishermen”: The postnational reimagination of community in Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen

ABSTRACT This article reads Chigozie Obioma’s Booker-finalist debut novel, The Fishermen, in the light of recent debates on postnationalism in contemporary African literature. The central intervention of the article is its examination of critical, self-reflexive ideations of community in the novel and the argument that such notions of community are vital for resisting theoretical models that presuppose “failure” or “crises” as the framework for conceptualizing contemporary national realities in the African context. Borrowing from Achille Mbembe’s theorization of postcolonial “entanglement” to modify Benedict Anderson’s thesis on the close relationship between enlightenment modernity and national community, the article closely reads the novel as the site of a complex inheritance and reimagination of community. Focusing on narrative voice and entangled temporalities, the article examines the varying registers of the central term “fishermen”. The article proposes that these resistant methodological approaches emerging from postcolonial Nigerian literature represent a layered articulation of alternative collective imaginaries.

Ben Okri’s Eco-Imagination in Every Leaf a Hallelujah (2021): An Afropolitan Approach

There are possibly myriad approaches to an examination of Sir Ben Okri’s African folktale, Every Leaf a Hallelujah (2021), that sings the praises of Mother Nature’s ability to transform human nature. Premised on the phenomenology of the eco-imagination that adopts Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka’s Imaginatio Creatrix as the pivotal force of the genesis/ontopoiesis of human life and reality, coupled with Arne Naess’s notion of “deep ecology” that likewise emphasises the intrinsic interconnectedness of all lifeforms and geophysical features on Planet Earth, the discussion shows that Every Leaf a Hallelujah implicitly explores the developmental phenomenology of perception via Achille Mbembe’s notion of Afropolitanism. It does this through the agency of the innocent prescience of a small Nigerian girl child, the seven-year-old Mangoshi who is attuned to the choral voices of nature. Writing against the rift of the prevalent Western belief in a nature that is utilitarian or where nature serves human needs, this article is embedded in an African eco-critical imaginary that investigates the interrelationship between human nature and Mother Nature from an Afropolitan literary perspective in which there is a mythic conjunction between humans and nature, as well as art and science. Echoing Tymieniecka’s phenomenology of life and the human creative condition, the argument concludes that Every Leaf a Hallelujah represents a significant contribution to contemporary discourse on conservation for sustainability.

Browning’s Poetics of Necropolitical Power Dynamics

This article explores the life-scaring power dynamics in Browning’s poetry regarding the social praxis of gender as staged by Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last Duchess.” To this end, it peruses these poems to show the poetic necropolitics; politics of death. Delving into the poems, the male chauvinist narrators hold the bodies of their female counterparts before annihilating them. Taking stock of necropolitical power wielded by the sovereign narrators, this paper aims to parse the deadening lives of the perpetrated Duchess and Porphyria. For this purpose, it deploys Achille Mbembe’s understanding of necropolitics as a critical insight that he imbibes from Michel Foucault’s biopolitical racism (that holds the authority to deploy alterity and expose life to death). Meanwhile, the study does not only expand the necropolitical literary explication of Browning's poems, nonetheless, it attempts to reorient the readers to reexamine the alibi of the killers in the poems. Enthused by Mbembe’s acumen that revisits how power makes its subjects docile through political decisionism: “who must live and who must die,” this paper debates the sexist discourse of the killer-narrators and the living-dead ladies before their killing. Largely, it wonders to know how the subjects turn out to be the living dead or the object of male sadism. To elucidate this life-scaring politics; necropolitics, this paper also probes the presence (hegemonic existence) of sexist males that renders the female absent (non-existence) before they are immolated in the poems. It concludes that sexist patriarchy replicating the sovereign power constitutes the precarious life of the females via making them abject and invisible through ‘corpsing-policy’ which becomes a pertinent issue to rear humanism in Humanity Studies.

Toward Next-Generation Phenomics: Precision Medicine, Spaceflight, Astronaut Omics, and Beyond.

Large investments over many decades in genomics in diverse fields such as precision medicine, plant biology, and recently, in space life science research and astronaut omics were not accompanied by a commensurate focus on high-throughput and granular characterization of phenotypes, thus resulting in a "phenomics lag" in systems science. There are also limits to what can be achieved through increases in sample sizes in genotype-phenotype association studies without commensurate advances in phenomics. These challenges beg a question. What might next-generation phenomics look like, given that the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence offer prospects and challenges for high-throughput digital phenotyping as a key component of next-generation phenomics? While attempting to answer this question, I also reflect on governance of digital technology and next-generation phenomics. I argue that it is timely to broaden the technical discourses through a lens of political theory. In this context, this analysis briefly engages with the recent book "The Earthly Community: Reflections on the Last Utopia," written by the historian and political theorist Achille Mbembe. The question posed by the book, "Will we be able to invent different modes of measuring that might open up the possibility of a different aesthetics, a different politics of inhabiting the Earth, of repairing and sharing the planet?" is directly relevant to healing of human diseases in ways that are cognizant of the interdependency of human and nonhuman animal health, and critical and historically informed governance of digital technologies that promise to benefit next-generation phenomics.

Social media and the form and content of Nigerian comic skits

The popularity of comic skits on Nigeria’s social media warrants the need to study the form and content of these pieces. This qualitative study examined the comic skits of Nigerian comedians: Taaooma, Mark Angel, Sabinus, and Bello Galadanchi. It employed Achille Mbembe’s ‘Theory of Postcolony’, as its theoretical framework and Netnography as its methodology, and revealed that the skits tackle the themes of gender roles, lingering effects of colonialism, social inequalities, religion, and corruption. Laughter becomes a tool for navigating power structures, critiquing social norms, and expressing discontent within a postcolonial context. The skits leverage short format (51s–4min) ideal for social media, employ slapstick, simple dialogue, visuals (clothing, facial expressions), cross-dressing (Taaooma) and single-actor portrayals of multiple roles (Taaooma, Galadanchi). Languages used include English, Nigerian Pidgin, and indigenous languages, accompanied by subtitles for wider accessibility. While sound effects punctuate jokes, heighten reactions, and establish mood, most of the skits follow the structure of Introduction, Rising Action, Climax, and Resolution. Social media comments indicated that the skits resonated with viewers, highlighting the popularity of certain skit makers across demographics and transnationally, implying a cross-cultural comic appeal, and the internet serving as a pan-African tool for sharing local culture.

The current violence of versatile surveillance: contributions of the panoptic threat to structural racism from Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe

O objetivo geral do presente artigo consiste em analisar e descrever criticamente a ameaça panóptica e o racismo estrutural, bem como as suas intersecções, a partir das obras de Michel Foucault e Achille Mbembe. Por um lado, em Vigiar e Punir, Foucault argumenta que o panoptismo representa um modelo governamental centrado na capacidade do Estado de exercer a dominação sobre os indivíduos, ao evidenciar o nascimento de uma sociedade disciplinar onde a visibilidade e a vigilância são mecanismos indispensáveis à manutenção do ordenamento totalitário. Por outro lado, em Crítica da Razão Negra, Mbembe examina a problemática ontológica do estado de raça e evidencia que o seu embasamento anticientífico hierarquiza grupos humanos, legitima intervenções de exploração e violência, promove a degradação das identidades não-europeias, assim como enfatiza que a representação da humanidade racializada serve de dispositivo para a desumanização e o controle social. Com base nesta fusão de horizontes, através de uma metodologia analítico-descritiva que coaduna revisão bibliográfica, leitura aproximada e escrita criativa, pretende-se demonstrar enquanto resultado de pesquisa até que ponto os dois filósofos compreendem a relação entre poder, saber e subjetividade, bem como de que maneira eles acenam para uma crítica à retroalimentação necrobiopolítica entre o panoptismo e o racismo na contemporaneidade.

The necropolitics of military amnesty: Peacebuilding and Othering in Northern Ireland

Necropolitics, as described by Achille Mbembe, is the sovereign’s capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. In its delineation of which bodies can be killed and which bodies must not be killed, necropolitics is the framework through which governments assign value to human life that justifies killing in the name of the greater good. Proposed legislation in the UK Parliament from 2021 suggested the state intended to limit prosecutions of British service personnel for killings that occurred during Operation Banner, the UK military operation in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 2007. Interrogating the employment of military amnesty, we discuss the ways amnesty can maintain necropolitical organizations by working to reaffirm antagonistic relations between peacebuilding parties despite claims that it is a reconciliatory measure. Through a necropolitical lens, we examine historical approaches to military prosecutions by the UK alongside current proposals for amnesty over conflict-related homicides committed in Northern Ireland. Interrogating peacebuilding and reconciliation efforts made in the UK to address the conflict in Northern Ireland, we assert that the calls for amnesty remain under the same necropolitical organization that facilitated the Troubles to begin with and maintain narratives that Other Northern Ireland from Britain.

Migration, Borderland Subjectivity and the Novel Form: Reading Temporary People

The novel form has been traced as contemporaneous with the nation-state form and is associated with a homogenous speaking community. This article concerns itself with the role of affect in sustaining a community in a condition in which the distinction between the agent of capital and that of community is not unconditionally or ahistorically available. Drawing its theoretical apparatus from the conceptualisation of post colony by Achille Mbembe, and on studies of rumour, and contextualising itself in the contractual labour practice known as kafala and the exclusionary practices of citizenship in the countries of the Arab Gulf, this article argues that the reproduction of the exploitative capital/state along the axes of community produces both the capital/state and the community along affective lines, and away from the bureaucratic coldness or democratic openness that is supposed to characterise them. Taking Deepak Unnikrishnan’s Temporary People, as an instance of a novel produced from such a milieu, the article pays attention to the figure of the reader because traditionally scholarship has put the onus of the effects of the novel such as nationalism as the affordance of the figure of the reader. The article illustrates reconfigurations in the form of the novel and suggests that it is through fallibility rather than efficiency that power operates both as oppressive and resistant.

The Things of Order: Affect, Material Culture, Dispositif

Abstract: Commenting on Frantz Fanon's account of the material culture created by European colonizers in the aftermath of invasion, Achille Mbembe notes that the colony is fundamentally a state of war, a contest of forces, in which "sensory life"—the continuum of bodies, objects, and landscapes—is a battlefield. "From this point of view," he writes, "colonial domination requires an enormous investment in affect and ceremony and a significant emotional expenditure." This essay argues for a reappraisal of the work of Michel Foucault as a theory of material culture. Linking Foucault's work on power to studies of material culture, it reviews Foucault's late concept of the dispositif , which specifies the ways power is projected by objects like the scaffold and the panopticon. The article then puts Foucault's approach to material culture in conversation with two strands of contemporary critical thought—New Materialism and affect theory—to show how a full-fledged analytics of power–matter–affect might emerge. What Foucault calls the "analytics of power" supports the critical study of affect and ceremony—the streams of force that constitute subjectivity above, beneath, or outside of language. By way of example, this article explores how this emergent framework can provide new resources for moving beyond liberal approaches to the problem of Confederate monuments. Although Foucault is often read as a theorist preoccupied with discourse, a reconsideration of the dispositif shows that Foucault's analytics of power enhances our understanding of the role of material culture in guiding political affects.

"Pandemics know no borders," but Responses to Pandemics Do: Global Health, COVID-19, and Latin America.

This article focuses on Brazil and Peru, the Latin American epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic during 2020 and 2021. The pandemic magnified the legacy of years of neoliberal policies, corruption and racism in these countries, the limitations of their poverty-reduction programs, the fragility of their democratic systems, and the insufficient political regard for public health and basic sanitation. I rely on the concepts of negligence and necropolitics. The first refers to the abdication of authorities in providing sufficient basic services to its citizens. The second - coined by Achille Mbembe before the pandemic - is used to explain the banalization by governments of preventable deaths of discriminated social groups. On a global level, the problematic access to medical equipment and vaccines was a failure because of the hoarding of vaccines by rich nations and the blaming of developing countries for their high mortality. The result was that national and international governmental reactions to COVID-19 worsened health asymmetries within countries and between the Global North and South.

Climate justice and global development: outlining a new framework from the work of Achille Mbembe and Charles Mills

ABSTRACT As currently understood and practiced, global development and climate justice appear irreconcilable. In fact, global development has been and remains a key driver of climate inequalities. We hold that this is not an accident, but instead is a result of global development being established within worldwide systems of oppression. We define global development as setting the goals for, and the processes for achieving, what constitutes a good life for all communities, and taking the steps needed to reach those goals. This article provides an outline of how the theories of two moral and political philosophers – Achille Mbembe and Charles Mills – point us in the direction of an ethical framework for the relationship of humans to each other and to the natural world. We examine two contexts that should motivate development practitioners to move from the current development regime toward the direction of a transformational ethical framework built off the work of these philosophers: (i) the perpetual failure of global development practice to foster a humane approach to migration; and (ii) the inability of global development solutions, like SDGs and leapfrogging, to stray from the very problems they are intended to address.

The racial politics of Afropolitanism and Zukiswa Wanner’s London, Cape Town, Joburg

ABSTRACT While scholars have long taken Afropolitanism to task for its classism, its racial politics have largely been praised. Pushing against this (un)critical consensus, this article offers the first sustained analysis of the racial politics informing Achille Mbembe’s theory of Afropolitanism alongside Zukiswa Wanner’s novel London, Cape Town, Joburg (2014). Making visible how institutional racism continues to define the post-apartheid present, it shows that both authors differentially single out race for scrutiny and collude in mystifying white dominance in South Africa. Just as Mbembe’s works on Afropolitanism are preoccupied with race but obfuscate racism, Wanner’s novel uses racialized drama as an important plot device yet stigmatizes the denunciation of white supremacy, while sharply critiquing homophobia, sexism, and xenophobia. In invoking race as central while relieving white people of responsibility for the racist status quo, these works display paradoxes that reveal an investment in silencing racism, paradoxes which this article lays bare.

Decolonisation as Dis-Enclosure: overcoming the dangers of positionality and identity in comparative education

ABSTRACT This conceptual paper aims to discuss how to address the dangers emerging from scholars’ proclamations of positionality and identity in debates on decolonisation in comparative education. The approach proposed engages with two ideas that were central to the work of French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy and were further developed by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe: dis-enclosure and being-in-common. The author argues that these two ideas offer an alternative ontology of decolonisation that challenges the binary logic of identitarian thinking (e.g. western/non-western; white/non-white) in which proclamations of positionality and identity may often be rooted. This argument highlights the theoretical and political advantages of adopting a non-identitarian perspective for decolonisation debates in comparative education. The paper concludes with considering the implications of this alternative ontology of decolonisation in comparative education, with a specific focus on how scholars can foreground a shared responsibility for ‘reparative futures’ in research, writing, and teaching.

Nigerian Radicalism: Towards a New Definition via a Historical Survey

Abstract Recent military coups in West Africa have put the continent’s democratisation itself into question. In some places, for the moment, these coups appear to have popular backing. Nigeria, where radicalism is firmly rooted in democratic values and a human-rights framework, the radical grassroots opposition to the Buhari government’s creeping authoritarianism lies drenched in blood. The roots of this development go back to the history of Nigeria’s radicalism in the twentieth century. Much has appeared on the global 1968 recently, including that of Africa. 1970s/1980s-style radicalism is reappearing today with Omoyele Sowore’s 2018 presidential candidacy, with the African Action Congress party, the #EndSARS protests and the tragic Lekki Toll Gate massacre (2020) in Nigeria. The shift towards radicalism is palpable with protest music such as Falz’s This is Nigeria, and Burna Boy’s Monsters you Made, both explicitly targeting neocolonialism and police brutality. Contrary to Achille Mbembe’s sweeping dismissal of African radicalism, the movement with very deep roots under study is meaningful once again, and is gathering momentum in West Africa’s giant polity. This article applies Walter Benjamin’s and also Nigerian radical thinkers’ conceptualisation of political, social and artistic radicalism, while it frames the Nigerian version via the movement’s history, in which marxisant theory and praxis, feminism, human rights and pro-democracy movements interact with emancipatory strands of Islam, Christianity, Igbo Judaism, and animism. In the context of Nigerian radicalism, even expressly pro-capitalist art theory performs a radical social function by stressing the African’s right to make universal statements (Olu Oguibe) in its de facto defiance of the neo-colony. As these different strands of protest meet, ethnic uprisings (amongst them IPOB) find ways to establish common cause with social radicalism, posing a composite threat to the prebendalist oligarchy that rules and oppresses the country via a militarised neoliberalism.

Bio-necropolitics as a form of government and the genocide of the Yanomami people

The present research aims, through a correlation of the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics, developed respectively by Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe, to discuss, through bibliographical research, the precarious situation in which the Yanomami people find themselves in the face of the invasion of their lands by the illegal mining industry. Therefore, it will be argued that this precarious situation goes beyond mere government neglect or involuntary acts but represents a project of extermination of the Yanomami population, that is, necropolitics. Thus, this research will expound on the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics, so that the conflict between the Yanomami people and the invasion of illegal mining can be understood not merely as an isolated phenomenon, but rather as part of a comprehensive political project of extermination and systematic violation of human rights.