Center for the Humanities: A Conversation with Achille Mbembe

This final session of the ongoing speaker series Mapping Planetary Humanities will consist of an interview on the ways that Dr. Achille Mbembe’s work intersects with questions of planetary, decolonization and critical race studies, followed Q&A with the audience.

Dr Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. A renowned public intellectual and prolific writer, Dr Mbembe has written extensively on postcolonial theory and African history and politics. His most recent work theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world through the lens of necropolitics and explores planetary habitability as inseparable from the politics of care, repair and restitution.

To help facilitate our discussion on planetary and decolonization, we invite you to review “Thoughts on the planetary: An interview with Achille Mbembe,” published on September 5th, 2019, with New Frame, as well as Chapter 1, “Planetary Entanglements,” from Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization, and the Introduction and Epilogue (“The Becoming Black of the World”and “There is Only One World,”respectively) from
Critique of Black Reason. Please email arosoaie@wisc.edu if you ned help accessing these sources.

Alien Earth: Introduction to Planetary Humanities is hosted by the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Our workshop aims to draw together an interdisciplinary consortium of scholars from across humanities and sciences to explore the intersections of astronomy, colonialism and critical race studies, climate change and environmental justice. 

Please join the event via Zoom: https://uwmadison.zoom.us/j/93556122629