Critique of Black Reason, by Achille Mbembe

Abstract

Critique of Black Reason (henceforth Critique) is a dense and poetic book. Right from its introduction, its density and poetic prose cannot be ignored. It is also an ambitious book that achieves its ambition. This book is a genealogy of the colonial library and archive. It is a tour of Black reason in western modernity. It explores how people from non-western worlds came to be violently converted into racial objects and subjects.