“Thinking in Lightning and Thunder”: An Interview with Achille Mbembe

Abstract Achille Mbembe has followed a singular path that led him to live and think in several continents at once: Africa, Europe, North America. He is one of the most innovative contemporary thinkers today, liberating the analysis of Africa (both myth and reality) from the classic economic and institutional approach, freeing this approach from its privileged axes (ancient vs. modern, colony vs. metropole, etc.), and displacing the point of view of rationality to the imaginary. From book to book, from position to position, he has developed an intra- and intercontinental migrant thought that has recently given birth to a “critique of negro reason [critque de la raison nègre],” since the Negro [le Nègre], he explains, is the only one whose flesh was made, under the empire of race, into a commodity. How does Achille Mbembe understand his work? How does he accomplish it? That is the guiding thread of this interview.