Achille Mbembe

Mbembe works within and against the Foucault-Deleuze poststructuralist tradition; the analytical tools of biopolitics, governmentality, and the dispersed-power critique are central.

"The sovereign right to kill is the ultimate expression of power in our age." (Necropolitics, 2003)

Mbembe's engagement with Fanon, Césaire, and the philosophical-theological tradition of African and African-diasporic liberation places him in dialogue with liberation theology, even where his own register is secular-philosophical.

"The colony was the laboratory of the modern political; what was done there has come home to roost." (On the Postcolony)

Mbembe works within the Marxist-postcolonial tradition (Fanon, Césaire, James) while extending it to address the late-twentieth-century globalization of capital and the structural roles of race in extractive systems.

"Capitalism cannot be understood apart from race; race cannot be understood apart from capitalism." (Critique of Black Reason)

Mbembe's late work engages African religious-relational ontologies as resources for thinking beyond the modern sovereign-subject framework.

"To inhabit African ontology is to think of the dead as actors, of the ancestors as present, of the earth as having voice." (Out of the Dark Night)

Mbembe is critical of the contemporary Pentecostal-Charismatic movements that have spread across sub-Saharan Africa, reading them partly as continuation of colonial-evangelical structures under new auspices.

"The current Pentecostal expansion in Africa is in many respects a continuation of the missionary project under post-colonial cover." (Out of the Dark Night)