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Joseph-Achille Mbembe (; born 1957) is a Cameroon historian and political theorist who is a research professor in history and politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is well known for his writings on colonialism and its consequences and is a leading figure in new wave French critical theory. Achille Mbembe to deliver a second "Thinking Africa" Public Lecture , Rhodes University, 5 July 2012
Mbembe was assistant professor of history at Columbia University, New York, from 1988 to 1991, a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, associate professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, executive director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting professor at Yale University in 2003. He was a research professor in history and politics at Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute. In 2020 Mbembe delivered the presidential lecture in the Humanities at Stanford University.
Mbembe has written extensively on African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris: Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research Foundation.
He is a contributing editor to the scholarly journal Public Culture." Achille Mbembe" (faculty page). Division of Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought, European Graduate School. egs.edu. Retrieved 2018-07-11.
Mbembe's most important works are: Les jeunes et l'ordre politique en Afrique noire (1985); La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1920–1960); Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (1996); De la postcolonie. Essai sur l'imagination politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine (On the Postcolony) (2000); Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique décolonisée (2010); Critique de la raison nègre (2013).
His central work On the Postcolony was translated into English and released by University of California Press in 2001. This influential work has also been republished in an African edition by Wits University Press and contains a new preface by Achille Mbembe. In this text, Mbembe argues that academic and popular discourse on Africa gets caught within various cliches tied to Western fantasies and fears. Following Frantz Fanon and Sigmund Freud, Mbembe holds that this depiction is not a reflection of an authentic Africa but an unconscious projection tied to guilt, disavowal, and the compulsion to repeat. Like James Ferguson, V.Y. Mudimbe, and others, Mbembe interprets Africa not as a defined, isolated place but as a fraught relationship between itself and the rest of the world which plays out simultaneously on political, psychic, semiotic, and sexual levels.
Mbembe claims that Michel Foucault's concept of biopower – as an assemblage of disciplinary power and biopolitics – is no longer sufficient to explain these contemporary forms of subjugation. To the insights of Foucault regarding the notions of sovereign power and biopower, Mbembe adds the concept of necropolitics, which goes beyond merely "inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses". Discussing the examples of Palestine, Africa, and Kosovo, Mbembe shows how the power of sovereignty now becomes enacted through the creation of zones of death where death becomes the ultimate exercise of domination and the primary form of resistance.
He has also examined Johannesburg as a metropolitan city and the work of Frantz Fanon., Judith Butler, and David Theo-Goldberg in 2016]]Achille Mbembe denounces the lack of democracy in Africa, and calls for the end of the CFA franc, and of French military bases in Africa, he highlights the loss of French influence in Africa.
The false evidence for this charge was based on comments Mbembe made in two books where he drew parallels between the separatist policies deployed in the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and South Africa under Apartheid. Mbembe was supported by groups of Israeli and Jewish academics, including some prominent German Holocaust scholars. Concerns were raised over what some argued was a "weaponization of antisemitism", and, later that year, in December, representatives of 32 prominent cultural institutions issued a declaration both rejecting the BDS movement and, at the same time, warning that, rather than reining in antisemitism, the resolution posed dangers to freedom of speech. In response, Monika Grütters, Germany's parliamentary state secretary for culture, stated that cultural institutions walk a tightrope between artistic freedoms and socially acceptable ideas, and that anti-Semitism was a redline issue.
In 2010 and 2015, Mbembe signed petitions endorsing the academic boycott of Israel.
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