Achille Mbembe
Translated by Carolyn Shread
When considering the recent history of critical thought, two major events invite reflection today. First, Europe is no longer the center of gravity of the world. As I wrote in the introduction to Critique of Black Reason, this is “the fundamental experience of our era.”[1] This change does not mean that Europe no longer has any influence on the workings of the world, nor that we should now discount it. But Europe can no longer harbor the illusion that it alone has the power to dictate the course of the world. This is the case not only for the economy or for military and technological power; it is also true in the field of culture, arts, and ideas.
Second, there is a clear danger that in response to this historical downgrading, this eclipse, some people from the extreme right to the extreme left have been drawn either to nihilism or to ideological excess (or both), that is, by what I call late Eurocentrism, a Eurocentrism that is still more rancid and aggressive, even more deaf, blind, and vindictive than in the past. It is, indeed, a form of folly.
Chronologically, late Eurocentrism is the direct heritage of two earlier manifestations, each as reactionary as the other. Originally, there was primitive Eurocentrism, the type associated with imperial conquests, military occupation, and exploitation of colonial territories.[2] Then, from the 1950s, an anti-third-world Eurocentrism arose in opposition to anticolonial nationalisms. It reached its apogee in the 1970s in the critique of dependence and unequal development theories and the attempts to establish a more just international economic order.[3] All this occurred before the advent of neoliberalism, of which late Eurocentrism is, so to speak, the offshoot.
With the arrival of China on the world stage, the illusion of supremacy seemingly ran up against its ultimate limits.[4] The question now is to assess the full consequences of this situation: first it requires the creation of new paths for art and thought; second, bridges and byways must be built to facilitate encounters, so that together we can finally free ourselves of singular visions of history, and even more than that, the constant colonial temptation to hierarchize beings and objects.
What our present moment in fact demands is a welcoming of other ways of experiencing time and space. In the era of the combustion of the planet, as “radioactive contamination is constantly growing and expanding its reach across the planet beyond national borders,” we must invent other ways of inhabiting Earth, envisaging it as a true refuge not just for some, but for all—human and nonhuman.[5]
1.
In this context, how can we forget that in the Atlantic Basin from 1619 onward the greatest obstacle to the project of a common inhabiting of Earth was race?
Originally, race is an entirely fantastical reality. It has never existed as a natural fact. At the beginning of the modern period, perhaps for the first time, it was discovered that as a spectral reality, race offers an inexhaustible resource, that it is, a formidable technology of power. To achieve this effect, race must be constantly produced, manufactured and circulated. This historical process is what we call racializing.
Racializing refers to the conscious seizing and deployment of a set of techniques of power (legal, instrumental and representational techniques, social conventions, mores, customs and habits) in order to produce a reality (race) and to naturalize it as quickly as possible. To achieve this goal, its manufactured nature must be masked, precisely in order to represent the result as a natural fact, even though it is no such thing.
In the Atlantic Triangle, this production of reality according to the principle of partition, differentiation, separation and hierarchization has been operational since the seventeenth century.[6] Moreover, the long axis that ties Europe to Africa, Africa to the Americas, and the Americas to Europe in what is called the age of Enlightenment, culminated with the production of the Black Codes (Codes Noirs). Via these Black Codes, race—now a hypostatized fantastical category—lodged itself in many legal apparati, notably in colonial and enslavement regimes.[7] These regimes formed a space that was essentially outside of time in which, as a technique of power, racism (actually a historically datable power dynamic) now found within itself both the principle and end of its functioning.
In legal terms, the Black Codes transformed people of African descent into “Blacks,” that is, into an exploitable raw material, the matter of wealth. As the product of a power dynamic and a dominating relation, the raced person, the “Black,” was simultaneously an exchange value and a use value. This person had the value of personal property or a good. The person was related to the use of a thing. At the same time, the person was the creator of things and value. However, unlike the proletariat per se, neither their labor power nor the energy resource they offered nor the product of their labor are exchanged for a salary.[8]
This form of originary expropriation cannot be reduced objectively to the class alienation at the heart of orthodox Marxism. It certainly shares with wage earners the experience of an operation capturing time, energy and labor power but it is fundamentally different in that racial alienation is a form of native alienation that cannot be quantified and has no objective equivalent.[9] In conjunction with the capturing of bodies, energies, and even vital flows, there is an originary discrediting and shaming, a hereditary debasement and abjection that is transmitted from one generation to the next and that is therefore, by its very definition, insurmountable. This effect is what sociologist Orlando Patterson terms “social death.”[10]
2.
There is no shadow of a doubt that race and the principle of racial hierarchy were the preferred motors of colonial thinking.[11] The fact that as a result colonial thinking was one of the primary matrices of Eurocentrism has been demonstrated many times over. But let us not forget that colonial thinking does not comprise the entirety of European thought since throughout the centuries it also developed the terms of its own critique at its very core.
Colonial thinking should thus be understood as the set of techniques and sciences, myths, knowledge and skills that, from the fifteenth century onwards, made possible the destruction of the conditions of renewal of life on Earth. The deployment of this assemblage (myths, science, knowledge, skills) over the course of more than four centuries has, moreover, led to a profound destabilization in both many distant societies and natural processes in general.[12] In Afro-diasporic thought, the colonial gesture reflects the capturing of autonomous power and bodies, vital flows that are subdivided, expended, recoded (racialization) in an attempt to transform them into immediately manipulable, sellable and buyable energy.
One of the major characteristics of colonial thinking—and Eurocentrism—thus understood is the place granted to abstraction. Indeed, from the colonial point of view, knowing does not necessarily consist in a staying with things in themselves, let alone with Others. Knowing essentially amounts to shaping and quantifying relations at a distance—the relations of distance between units, each of which is grasped in isolation. These units are held separate from one another in what, in another context, Bartoli and Gosselin term “a relation of mutual distancing.”[13]
But this capacity to shape, codify, and institutionalize separation relations is not simply a mental affair. In many cases, it leads to the destruction of the conditions of sensible experience, an experience that, as we are realizing more and more today, is absolutely necessary for any ethic of cohabitation, whether it be the coexistence of humans or between species.
Alongside techniques and sciences, knowledge and skills, there were also, of course, infrastructures. Contrary to what orthodox Marxists believe, race was one of these. Who can deny the extent to which colonial racism was consubstantial with liberalism and racial violence necessary to the constitution of the global order?[14] Who can deny the role race has played in the dynamics of dispossession and exploitation on a global scale and in the mechanisms instituting power and society in Western societies?[15]
With the demise of the Eurocentrist illusion, the possibility thus arises for us to turn our backs once and for all on what Stuart Hall called “racial fundamentalism”—a phenomenon that has also served as a pillar for capitalism in as much as capitalism itself constantly leans on what are, in effect, racial subsidies to further its planetary expansion.[16]
In the current moment almost everything points, if not to a rupture, then at least to a renewed contestation of the sort of virulent, nativist Eurocentrism that adopts eradication as its goal and whose manifestations we witness in the regular attempts at stigmatization of thought that is supposedly non-native, both in France and elsewhere.
As the offshoot of neoliberalism in its authoritarian phase, late Eurocentrism is a deceitful ideology that claims to defend science, secularism, the Republic, Enlightenment, and universalism, even as it knows next to nothing about the universe, other worlds, and other histories. In fact, it seeks above all else to make everything that eludes it vanish from the surface of the Earth. What it is, in truth, is both a corrupt and nihilist response to European loss of social privilege. Clinging to a fictive past and ignoring traditions of dissidence within the European canon itself, it fools itself with a mortal melancholy while what the world actually needs now is new thinking about life.[17]
Where primitive Eurocentrism sought to establish European conquest and domination of the world, the late Eurocentrism of the twenty-first century seeks to justify the battening down of Europe on itself, its withdrawal from the world (askêsis) and its eclipse, calling for a extirpating violence against currents of thought that contest it and individuals who bear these ideas, starting with nonwhite women thinkers.
3.
Contrary to common assumptions, critique of Eurocentrism in its various forms is not new. The fact that it is appearing today under the guise of decolonial theories, postcolonial studies, or the critiques of race, gender, and intersectional approaches will be news only to those who, walled off in their local visions, willingly cut themselves off from voyages in planetary thought.
Despite what is frequently claimed, the critique of Eurocentrism never sought to replace class warfare with race warfare; rather, it has always sought to bring together race, class, and gender conflict. In afro-diasporic traditions in particular, the critique crystallized around several key concepts, notably abolition and decolonization, which have always been the subject of fierce debates among afro-centrists, afro-pessimists and afro-futurists.
It is safe to say that abolitionism not only preceded the Enlightenment but is precisely what guarantees its universality. So long as Enlightenment has not integrated abolitionism, it remains fundamentally tribal. This vast multinational and multiracial intellectual movement spanned three centuries. Prefiguring what we now call intersectionality, it brought together in a single knot both racial and gender issues (the race of classes and their gender), questions linked to the history of capitalism itself (the class of races and their gender) and concerns about universal justice (Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice. The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, Edited by Alfreda M. Duster, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1970).[18]
Abolitionism experienced two significant moments. The first was the growing criticism of the slave trade and the enslavement system in the Americas from the sixteenth century onwards (Bartolomeo de las Casas). This movement reached its apogee among the Quakers and other Protestant dissidents and in revolutionary and anticolonial groups between 1770 and 1820.[19]
This abolitionist moment fostered the emergence of generations of Black intellectuals who, in the pathogenic context of today no doubt appear on the lists drawn up by the Observatoire du décolonialisme and regularly appear in publications—William Wells Brown, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederik Douglass, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, William Hamilton, Martin Delany and others.[20] The Haitian Revolution of 1791 to 1804 was the high point of the antienslavement cause. The second abolitionist wave, demanding the immediate end of the enslavement system, took place from the 1820s to the time of the American civil war.[21]
While the concept of abolition is opposed on principle to all and any regime of capture and represents a radical demand for justice in the face of everything that endangers the conditions of renewal of life, anticolonialism is no less demanding. In fact, the anticolonialist movement extends the originary intuitions of the abolitionist movement. Anticolonialism seeks self-determination on principle, that is, it calls for the liberation of power, the power of those who are reduced to raw materials in the colonial paradigm.[22] Similarly to the abolitionist project, anticolonialism seeks to reinvent communal forms and support new phenomena.[23]
During the Négritude period, which coincided with the end of the war against fascism and Hitlerism, anticolonialism identified with the quest for a self-founding logos.[24] Today, far more than a cry of protest, decolonize has become an injunction, an unstoppable movement. Of course, this quest has always involved it its own ambiguities and contradictions.[25] Simultaneously an act of defiance, a coup, and a taking of power via the power to self-institute, the decolonial summons captivated as many minds in the North as in the Souths of the world.
4.
The injunction to decolonize would, however, be of limited interest if it did not lead to a truly radical cultural agenda, one such as the much regretted Édouard Glissant continued to propose up until recently. This agenda focused on the idea of Whole World.
The concept of Whole World has three distinctive features. First, it is committed to a total break with all forms of closing in on the self, whether in the form of a territorial, national, ethno-racial, or religious enclosure. Second, it is opposed to the sort of authoritarian universalism upon which the colonial enterprise is founded—a universalism based on conquest that sought to achieve its goals not through a multiplicity of bodies and beings but within a single body arbitrarily held as the one and only truly significant body. Thirdly, in the Whole-World conception, the drive to know is first and foremost an invitation to emerge from willing ignorance and discover our own limits. More than anything, it is about learning to be-born-with-others, that is, an uncompromising break up of all the mirrors expected to faithfully return an image of the self.
In Glissant’s thought, the world of Whole World twists and weaves itself in tangled relations between a multiplicity of centers. The greatest obstacle to its accession is an ignorance that is so self-unaware that it ultimately transforms into a pure nativism that tries to pass as both science and universalism.
The battle against this self-interested form of ignorance requires a departure from the self, a deliberate opening up the possibility of multiple passages and multiple crossings for only the trial of passage and crossing allows us to not talk constantly either about ourselves or about other worlds, in their place, as if they did not already exist for themselves. It is instead to look together and see, but each time starting from several worlds.
The same might be said, mutatis mutandis, of decolonization proper. To decolonize knowledge, arts, and thinking is to try to listen, look, and see reality starting from several worlds or centers at once; to read and interpret history from a multiplicity of archives.
A project of this sort urgently requires a fresh critique of difference and segregation. For without a resolute critique of difference what V.Y. Mudimbe called “the colonial library” that is the cornerstone of Eurocentrism will never be dismantled.[26] To decolonize is to learn to be born together (cobirth). Being born together is the only way to overcome the two-fold desire for abstraction and segregation that typifies colonial thinking—both the separation of humans amongst themselves and the separation of humans from other species, from nature and the multiple forces of life.
5.
Ultimately, the Eurocentrist illusion failed. From its ashes, in the North, South and East, we see emerging new ways of thinking, thinking that is truly planetary. This thought not only takes humans as its object but also earth, fire, air, water, and winds, in short, life itself.[27] These modes of thinking are all anticolonial by definition, if by colonial we mean the refusal to be “born together,” the determination to separate, put up walls, all sorts of walls and fortresses, transforming pathways into borders, identity into enclosure and freedom into private property.[28]
These anti-colonial and post-Eurocentric modes of thought highlight not essences or compact and homogenous blocks, but instead porosities. They do not depend on the flying buttresses of a nationalistic heritage. Where Eurocentrism habitually cut up time, space, and history into discrete parts, marked by supposedly irreducible and unassimilable differences, these ways of thinking deal in tangled skeins. In art, music, cinema, and other forms of writing, they seek to multiply byways and build bridges. While late Eurocentrism sees nothing but lines of occupation, bridges to cut, walls to raise, prisons to build, points of arrival never connected to points of departure, Whole-World thinking valorizes the fact that we are all traversed through and through by multiple genealogies, forged by sinuous, interconnected lines.
Today we are witnessing the take-off of these anticolonial and postEurocentric ways of thinking, and not just in the Souths of the world. They are blooming everywhere, including in the heart of Europe. But in the current withdrawal into often fantastical identities, in the era of conspiracy theories and the deliberate production of fakes and disharmony, their thriving and resonance among new generations give rise to anxiety, fear and panic, especially in the old centers of the world but not exclusively.[29]
This is the case because a new war with a quasi-religious appearance has taken hold of the world. Waged in all corners of the earth scale by the global alt-right against a selection of real and imaginary enemies (liberals, leftists, Marxists, activists for minority, immigration, queer, decolonial feminists, islamo-leftists), its goal is to overturn the very terms of reality along with its modes of appearance and revelation.
Studying the way in which this war is waged allows us to shine a harsh light on some of the great fantasies of our epoch.[30] The first is the fantasy of closure and its corollary, eradicating and extirpating violence. This desire for brutality, especially against those who have lost out, the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us, particularly those who were formerly subjected, feeds off of the rise in theologies of necrosis. It presents feeble fables that preach impossibility and incompatibility—impossible encounters, impossible sharing, in short, the impossibility of a multiplicity of worlds. Here there is a drive towards totalization everywhere.[31]
The second is the fantasy of extinction and replacement.[32] In this war of demonization and delegitimization, which combines fundamentally incompatible narratives, it is claimed that the white race is under siege, threatened with extinction, the victim of pernicious counter-racism.
The West and its “civilization” are presented as having all the features of a full and self-sufficient body, developed throughout the centuries from its own cloth. It owes a debt to no one, still less any reparation. Meanwhile, it is the recipient of serious internal threats from groups that are themselves inside, but that are ready to ally themselves with ungrateful and malevolent enemies.[33] Hence the obligation to mount a massive self-defense.[34]
The necrosis theology used to justify this war distinguishes two antagonistic categories of human beings: the good and the bad, enemies and friends, the majority and the minority. Dualistic and Manichean, it excludes any possibility of common inhabiting on principle.[35]
The necrosis theology used to justify this war distinguishes two antagonistic categories of human beings: the good and the bad, enemies and friends, the majority and the minority. Dualistic and Manichean, it excludes any possibility of common inhabiting on principle (Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumbler to Trump and the Alt-Right, John Hunt Publishing, 2017).
Meanwhile, from every corner of the earth cries that cannot be stifled rise up constantly towards the heavens. The old problem of knowing how to think the singularity of other people, along with the irreducibility of their suffering, returns once again with acuity, even as the planet is caught up in a movement of accelerated combustion and the call for thinking that is not local or regional, but truly planetary, has never been heard so urgently.
6.
The elements of just such a planetary mode of thinking can be found in the archives of Whole World. Indeed, we should recall, there was a time when the critique of racial enslavement and colonialism, along with the denunciation of anti-Semitism, were established preconditions for the adoption of any position on universal battles for equality, justice ,and human emancipation.[36]
At that time it was a matter of proving that there were not two types of humanity; rather, spread all across the globe, it was thought that the innumerable mass of living beings converged towards a single humanity open to all the forces of life.[37] Far from referring solely to a relative, a compatriot, or a member of the clan, a fellow human being was, by definition, whoever had a human face, whether or not that face had the features of one’s own ethnic group, religion, or nationality.[38]
In the end, it was through revolts by enslaved peoples, such as the revolution in Haiti, the great abolitionist campaigns of the nineteenth century, and the anticolonial insurrections that categories such as freedom, alterity, universality, the right to self-determination “became flesh” for all, eventually acquiring a political and philosophical density, reaffirming the reality of our common participation in humanity. The hope was that through this “community of participation” the human adventure on Earth would eventually find its meaning. Each face taken in its singularity would finally be protected from inhumanity, and the suffering of those who made up the majority of humankind would finally come to an end.[39]
7.
In our time it is clear that ultra-nationalism as a social force and cultural sensibility, along with ideologies of racial supremacy, are experiencing a global renaissance. This renewal is accompanied by the rise of a hard, xenophobic, and openly racist extreme right, which is in power in many Western democratic institutions and whose influence can be felt even within the various strata of the techno-structure itself. In an environment marked by the segregation of memories and their privatization, as well as by discourses on incommensurability and the incomparable nature of suffering, the strictly ethical concept of the fellow human being as another self no longer holds.
The idea of an essential human resemblance has been replaced by the notion of difference, taken as both anathema and prohibition. As a result, it has become extremely difficult to determine the way in which each of the innumerable sites of defeat and dispossession, the trauma and abandon that modern history has bequeathed us, bear the face of the whole of humanity, torn asunder in every instance. Concepts such as the human, the human race, humankind, or humanity barely mean anything at all even if contemporary pandemics and the consequences of the ongoing combustion of the planet keep imbuing them with weight and significance.
In the West, but also in other parts of the world, we are witnessing the rise of new forms of racism that might be described as paroxysms. The nature of paroxysmal racism is that, in a metabolic manner, it can infiltrate the functioning of power, technology, culture, language, and even the air we breathe. The dual turn of racism towards a techno-algorithmic and eco-atmospheric variety is making it an increasingly lethal weapon, a virus.
This form of racism is termed viral because it goes hand in hand with the exacerbation of fears, including and especially the fear of extinction, which appears to have become one of the driving engines of white supremacy in the world. However, the virulence of contemporary racism is equaled only by its denial. Late Eurocentrism is a malignant form of this denial.
In a spectacular reversal, anti-racist efforts are held responsible for the rise in racism. The most invidious historical crimes in the heart of Europe by Europe are now blamed on others, starting with the descendants of the victims of European imperialism. Such is the case with anti-Semitism. At the same time, with the help of the escalation of technology and the crisis of neoliberalism, the illiberal turn of liberal democracies is hardening.
Perhaps the time will come when the regeneration of the forces of life so necessary to our survival on the plant will come from the global North. While we wait, a good part of Europe continues to wall itself up behind the darkest of ramparts. There is absolutely nothing to concede to this part of Europe, or to late Eurocentrism.
[This text was read virtually at the Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac Museum on the occasion of the “September Summit” organized in Paris during Saison Africa 2020.
Achille Mbembe is the author of Brutalisme (Paris, 2020). He is the cofounder with Felwine Sarr of Ateliers de la pensée in Dakar.
[After translating “The Universal Right to Breathe” as the world went into lockdown in 2020, I return here to Achille Mbembe’s thought as some places seemingly emerge from the pandemic – thereby revealing local and global disparities all the more forcefully. Has the virus changed us? Perhaps not, for while this was translated over the first federally recognized Juneteenth holiday in the United States, this translation also coincides with a doomed voting rights bill. These Notes offer the clarity and uncompromising historical account upon which the only possible futures for all can be built. Taking Celia Britton’s translation of Édouard Glissant’s Traité du Tout-Monde (Treatise on the Whole World, 2020), I called that world, rather than One or All, Whole World in English. Mbembe’s reflections on the centuries long effects of the fabrication of race via processes of racialization, pointed the way when it came to the “Nègre” of the Codes noirs: it is enough to refer to “Black” rather than any more offensive racial term. Late eurocentrism is a potent conceptual tool for showing the way forward, understanding the place for steely refusal of the newly emerging mechanisms of hate. I hope that my contribution to the linguistic crossings and encounters we need for planetary healing will offer a tiny reparation amidst all the work we have ahead to make our world whole—Carolyn Shread, translator]
[1] Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (2017).
[2] See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978), and Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, N.C., 2011)
[3] See André Gunder Frank, “Le développement du sous-développement”, Cahiers Vilfredo Pareto 6, nos. 16–17 (1968), and Samir Amin, L’accumulation à l’échelle mondiale (Paris, 1970). See also Samir Amin, L’eurocentrisme. Critique d’une idéologie (Paris, 1988), and Immanuel Wallerstein, “Eurocentrism and its Avatars: The Dilemmas of Social Science,”Sociological Bulletin, 1 Mar. 1997.
[4] See Giovanni Arrighi, Adam Smith in Beijing. Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2007).
[5] Sabu Kohso, Radiations et révolution. Capitalisme apocalyptique et luttes pour la vie au Japon (Paris, 2021). See also Kohso, “Radiation, Pandemic, Insurrection”, The New Inquiry, 14 Dec. 2020.
[6] See Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619–1877 (New York, 1993), and Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619–1860 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996).
[7] See Phillip J. Schwarz, Twice Condemned. Slaves and the Criminal Laws of Virginia, 1705–1865 (Union, N.J., 1998), and Sally E. Hadden, Slave Patrols. Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas (Cambridge, Mass., 2001).
[8] See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America. An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York, 1935).
[9] See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism. The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1983).
[10] See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).
[11] In the French context, see Elsa Dorlin, La matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française (Paris, 2006).
[12] See David Bartoli and Sophie Gosselin, Le toucher du monde. Techniques du naturer (Paris, 2020), p. 15.
[13] Ibid.
[14] See Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, 1999), and Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, N.J., 2016).
[15] See Stuart Hall, Selected Writings on Race and Difference (Durham, N.C, 2021), and Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, N.J., 2011).
[16] On these debates and critiques, see Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Cambridge, Mass., 2016); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass,, 2016); and Trevor Burnard and Giorgio Riello, “Slavery and the New History of Capitalism,” Journal of Global History 15, no. 2 (2020).
[17] See Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York, 2004).
[18] See Bronwen Everill, Not Made by Slaves. Ethical Capitalism in the Age of Abolition (Cambridge, Mass., 2020). See also
[19] See Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Charlottesville, N.C., 1996).
[20] See Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause. A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn., 2008).
[21] See Black Soldiers in Blue. African-American Troops in the Civil War Era, ed. John David Smith(Charlottesville, N.C.,2004).
[22] See Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, N.J., 2019).
[23] See Aric Putnam, The Insistent Call. Rhetorical Moments in Black Anticolonialism, 1929–1927 (Amherst, Mass., 2012); Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York, 2015); and Chad L. Williams, Torchbearers of Democracy: African-American Soldiers in World War I Era (Charlottesville, N.C., 2010).
[24] See Donna V. Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy. Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity (New York, 2011).
[25] See Mbembe, Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (New York, 2021) and “Thoughts on the Planetary: An Interview with Achille Mbembe,” 5 Sept. 2019.
[26] V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa (Bloomington, Ind., 1998).
[27] See Édouard Glissant, La terre, le feu, l’eau et les vents: Une anthologie de la poésie du Tout-Monde (Paris, 2010).
[28] See Tim Ingold, Une brève histoire des lignes (Paris, 2013).
[29] See Arjun Appadurai, “Fear of Small Disciplines: India’s Battle against Creative Thought”, Postcolonial Studies (2021).
[30] See Nick Land, The Dark Enlightenment, and Olivia Goldhill, “The Neo-Fascist Philosophy that Underpins Both the Alt-Right and Silicon Valley Technophiles”, Science Reporter, 18 June 2017.
[31] See Scott F. Alkin, “Deep Disagreement, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Rhetoric of the Red Pill,” Journal of Applied Philosophy 36, no 3 (2018).
[32] See Chetan Bhatt, “White Extinction: Metaphysical Elements of Contemporary Western Fascism,” Theory, Culture and Society, 23 June 2020.
[33] See Ilan E. Strauss, “The Dark Reality of Betting Against QAnon,” The Atlantic, 1 Jan. 2021; Clive Thompson, “QAnon Is Like a Game—A Most Dangerous Game,” Wired, 22 Sept. 2020; and David Goldberg, “On Civil War,” Critical Times, 9 Sept. 2020.
[34] See Roger Burrows, “On Neoreaction,” The Sociological Review, 28 Mar. 2019, and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Democracy. The God That Failed: The Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order (2001).
[35] See Angela Nagle, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumbler to Trump and the Alt-Right (2017).
[36] See Manu Goswami, “Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms,” The American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1461–85.
[37] See Helen Tilley, “Racial Science, Geopolitics, and Empires,” Isis 105 (2014): 773–81.
[38] See Michael Goebel, Anti-Imperial Metropolis. Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (New York, 2015).
[39] See Simone Weil, Écrits historiques et politiques (Paris, 1960), pp. 331–78.
In the Moment 