Critique of Black Reason.

• Author: Benjamin, Michael
• Position: GENERAL STUDIES - Book review

Mbembe, Achille. Critique of Black Reason. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017.

Achille Mbembe's Critique of Black Reason, translated from French with an insightful introduction by eminent historian Laurent DuBois, is a philosophical study of the meaning of Blackness within its historical development. It examines race as a biological and social phenomenon constructed by, within, and for the benefit of western capitalist traditions. Mbembe asserts the concepts failure to function as an authentic description of humanity in contemporary society. He draws upon a discourse developed in critical race theory using literary and social forms of thought and historical and political analysis of market economies. Mbembe argues that from the time of the western expansion of the Atlantic slave trade in the fifteenth century to the second half of the twentieth century, the mercantilist labor and extractive requirements of Europe's plantation...