Thinking the World from Africa: A Conversation with Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe is one of the preeminent critical theorists and public intellectuals of the current and future world. His intervention is to think the world in-common and the condition of planetary entanglement from Africa.

Join us in a conversation ranging across topics including on the postcolony and decoloniality; decolonizing knowledge and situated thinking; the planetary turn of the African predicament; necropolitics; borders, enclaves, insulation and networks; the planetary library and the disenclosure of the world; dispossession, restitution and repair; the politics of the living beyond humanism and for the habitability of the earth.

The conversation will be led by Meg Samuelson (University of Adelaide; Stellenbosch University). Registered attendees will be invited to pose questions to Professor Mbembe during the webinar as well as to submit questions by email in advance.

Cohosted by the Department of English, Creative Writing, and Film and the School of Humanities Research Theme “Stories from the South” at the University of Adelaide; the “Situations of Theory” Conference, Flinders University and the University of Adelaide; and the English Department of Stellenbosch University.

Achille Mbembe has written extensively on contemporary politics and philosophy, including On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001), Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2017), Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019) and Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2021). Originally written in French, his work has been translated into over 13 languages. Born in Cameroon and long resident in Johannesburg as Professor in the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (University of the Witwatersrand), Mbembe has also held positions at CODESRIA (Dakar) and at various institutions in the United States, including Columbia University, Duke University, Harvard University, University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has also held the Albert the Great Chair at the University of Koln (2019) and was an Honorary Professor at the Jakob Fugger-Zentrum, University of Augsburg (Germany). He is the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Paris VIII (France) and Universite Catholique de Louvain (Belgium). He has received numerous awards including the 2015 Geswichter Scholl-Preis, the 2018 Gerda Henkel Award and the 2018 Ernst Bloch Award. He delivered the 2020 Presidential Lecture in the Humanities at Stanford University and prepared and led the debate at the historic Africa-France Summit in Montpellier in October 2021.

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