Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian historian, political theorist, and public intellectual. In Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers a genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. 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 to uphold forms of oppression.

Group Discussions on “The Subject of Race” (Pages 10-20)

GROUP ONE

Why does Mbembe tie the concept of race to European colonialism? What are his arguments regarding Blackness as something produced to allow a “social link of subjection”? (Pages 11-12)

GROUP TWO

Elaborate on Mbembe’s conception of the Atlantic as an “epicenter of a new concatenation of worlds, the locus (space) of a new planetary consciousness” that emerged between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries. How did the Atlantic function as an incubator of a “Black condition”? (Pages 13-15)

GROUP THREE

How the “subjects of race” were legally constructed and thus dehumanized? How slavery was at the core of the western structures of labor and wealth production? (Pages 16-17)

GROUP FOUR

Describe the complexity of plantocracies in the Americas. Why does Mbembe define them as systems of unstable exploitation and “hunted by the specter of extermination”? (Pages 18-20)