. What are the central ideas of this writer, poet, thinker, filmmaker, or artist?

Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist, and public intellectual Achille Mbembe understands “Black reason” as a collection of “voices, pronouncements, discourses, forms of knowledge, commentary, and non-sense, whose object is things or people “of African origin.” Mbembe says that these narratives “provided the justifications for the arithmetic of racial dominations” (27). The appearance of a “racial subject” generated two lines of inquiry: “who are they?” (European thought) and “who I am?” (Afro-descendants) One of them produces an “identity judgment” and the other a “declaration of identity” (28). These ideas circulated “within a vast global network, producing the modern Black imaginary.”

In the first line of inquiry, Black people are conceived as “not really one of us, “a foreign body,” an Other that is part animal, part object, and somewhat ambiguously human, yet kinless, out of the law and any type of national subjecthood. Technologies of separation, categorization, and control are developed from these discourses (30, 31, 33).

In the second line of inquiry, Black people create an archive to reclaim their erased or neglected history. They “assume their responsibility to the world by creating a foundation for themselves. Writing, performance, and political actions seek to refute and “exorcise the demon of the first narrative and the structure of subjection within it” (28-9)

. Analyze one specific section by your chosen author that best communicates what you identified in the question above.

Exploring the second narrative, Mbembe says that:

The invocation of race “born from a feeling of loss, from the idea that the community has suffered a separation, that it is threatened with extermination, and that it must at all costs be rebuilt by reconstituting a thread of continuity beyond time, space, and dislocation.” (34) (See They Are We)

.Discuss how the text or piece’s structure enhances the author’s or creator’s conceptual goals.

This chapter is divided into thematic sections that examine European discourses on blackness, the history of enslavement and colonialism in Africa and the Americas, the legacies of slavery and racial division in the contemporary world, and the different uses of the noun “Black.” He argues that race is a security device, ideology, and governance technology through all these interconnected parts. Mbembe argues that the processes of racialization “aim to mark population groups, to fix as precisely as possible the limits within which they can circulate, and to determine as exactly as possible which sites they can occupy… it is all to prevent the dangers  inherent in their circulation and, if possible, to neutralize them in advance through immobilization, incarceration, or deportation.”  (35)

.How does your analysis of this piece relate to or is informed by our course texts?

The documentary They Are We presents a social interaction between Afro-Cubans and Africans in Sierra Leone that exemplifies how Africanidad (Africanness) could be more robust for identity formation than national or linguistic affinities. As Mbembe describes, “in such conditions invocation of race or the attempt to constitute a racial community aims first to forge ties and open up space in which to stand, to respond to a long history of subjugation and bio-political fracturing.” (33)