About

Achille Mbembe is a philosopher, political scientist, and critical thinker. Mbembe is professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He has worked as a visiting professor at several universities, including University of California, Berkeley; Yale University, Connecticut; University of California, Irvine; Duke University, North Carolina; and Harvard University, Massachusetts.  Mbembe has received several awards for his work, including the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis in 2015, the Gerda Henkel Award in 2018, and the Ernst Bloch Award in 2018.

A co-founder of Les Ateliers de la Pensée, Dakar and a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory, he has written extensively on contemporary  politics and philosophy, including On the Postcolony (2001), Critique of Black Reason (2016), Necropolitics (2019), and Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (2020).  Originally written in French, his books and numerous articles have been translated into more than a dozen languages. Mbembe works and lives in Johannesburg.