The critique of the Negro mind

The only black person among all humans who made his flesh a commodity. Moreover, the black person and race were nothing but one thing in the imagination of European societies, where since the eighteenth century they formed an unrecognized and often denied concept, from which the modern knowledge project— but also the project of governance— emerged. This makes us wonder whether Europe's retreat to the level of a simple province of this world and the disappearance of racism will signal the disintegration of one of its major countries, which is the black person? Or, on the contrary, after the melting of this historical image, will all of us turn into racists, with the new racism created by the policies of the new liberal, security, and occupation wars, theft, and practices of creating zones on a planetary level? In this scholarly and icon-averse introductory work, Achille Mbembe begins a critical reflection that is unavoidable to answer the main question about our present world: How can we view difference and life, the similar and the dissimilar? Achille Mbembe is a professor of history and political science and a philosopher at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (South Africa). He is also a thinker of post-colonial thought. And it is worth mentioning that his main interests lie in the history of Africa, African politics, and social sciences.