Critique of Black Reason
Open accessAbstract
In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason , Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Digital technologies mark the latest phase of modernity in the arrangement of race and blackness in global society and function in ways that perpetuate the racial and colonial formations of the past.
“According to Mbembe (2017), one of the foremost decolonial thinkers today, the advent, proliferation and ubiquity of digital technologies mark the latest phase of modernity in the arrangement of race and blackness in global society; digital technologies function in ways that perpetuate the racial and colonial formations of the past.”
From A decolonial approach to AI in higher education teaching and learning: strategies for undoing the ethics of digital neocolonialism (2023) · cites this paper as Mbembe 2017
A decolonial approach to AI for social good reveals power asymmetries underpinning AI for social good initiatives and highlights the colonial ethics and rationality embedded in the measurement and classification systems of the empire to control colonial subjects.
“Hence a decolonial approach to AI for social good, argues Madianou (2021), does not only reveal the power asymmetries underpinning ' AI for social good ' initiatives, but also highlights the colonial ethics and rationality that has always been embedded in the measurement and classi fi cation systems of the empire in order to control colonial subjects (see Mbembe 2017).”
From A decolonial approach to AI in higher education teaching and learning: strategies for undoing the ethics of digital neocolonialism (2023) · cites this paper as Mbembe 2017
Morality has been historically used to rationalize colonial practices.
“Such practices remind us that morality has been historically used to rationalize colonial practices (Mbembe 2017)”
From A decolonial approach to AI in higher education teaching and learning: strategies for undoing the ethics of digital neocolonialism (2023) · cites this paper as Mbembe 2017
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Can artificial intelligence be decolonized?
Adams, R. (2021) · Interdisciplinary Science Reviews · doi:10.1080/03080188.2020.1840225 · Cited by 194 · see citing works
Zembylas, M. (2023) · Learning, Media and Technology · doi:10.1080/17439884.2021.2010094 · Cited by 142 · see citing works
- Authors
- Mbembe, A.
- Venue
- Duke University Press eBooks
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- Published
- 2017-02-17
- OpenAlex
- W2599559014
- Cited by
- 1,213
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 124 · 2025: 112 · 2024: 103 · 2023: 165 · 2022: 100 · 2021: 161 · 2020: 229 · 2019: 133 · 2018: 70 · 2017: 16
- FWCI
- 110.95
- Type
- book
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- cc-by
- Locations
- Duke University Press eBooks (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Duke University Press eBooks (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Anthropology › Decolonial Thought and Epistemologies
- Social Sciences › Education › African cultural and philosophical studies
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Race, Identity, and Education in Brazil
- Keywords
- black reason, Blackness, racism, colonialism, slavery, transatlantic slave trade, nonhuman, extractive capitalism, financial capital, exclusion, decolonization, future of humanity
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
