Achille Mbembe, a leading figure in postcolonial thought and a major player in the global intellectual landscape, who wrote Critique de la raison nègre (2013), Politiques de l’inimitié (2016) et Brutalisme (2020), continues his probing reflections on our present-day world.
He demonstrates how our fundamental relationship to the Earth can only be that of the inhabitant and the passer-by. The Earth welcomes and shelters us as inhabitants and passers-by, preserving the traces of our existence, those that speak for us and in memory of whom we would have been, with others, in their midst. It is in this sense the very last of the utopias, the cornerstone of a new planetary consciousness.
Achille Mbembe is Director of the Innovation for Democracy Foundation and Professor of History and Political Science at the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg). He is the author of Sortir de la grande nuit (2010), Critique de la raison nègre (2013), Politiques de l'inimitié (2016) and Brutalisme (2020), publishsed by La Découverte.