Mbembe

The Cameroon-born political theorist Achille Mbembe has produced a body of work that deeply engages with Christianity: the role of Christianity in postcolonial and particularly African contexts, the role of Christianity in securing Europe’s self-image, and the role of Christian ideas in providing a framework for postcolonial resistance. In Mbembe’s most recent work, he has turned his critical apparatus from postcolonial contexts to blackness more generally, engaging with questions of race and religion across Africa and the diaspora. This chapter argues that Mbembe’s work offers promising resources for black theology, but it also has crippling limitations because of underlying secularist assumptions. Mbembe helpfully diagnoses postcolonial and black contexts as suffering from what is effectively theological heresy: a distorted relationship with ultimate authority brought about by colonialism and racialization. While Mbembe’s diagnosis deeply engages with theology, his prescription is secularist, embracing plurality that black experience is said to model. The chapter juxtaposes Mbembe’s reflections on colonial and racializing heresy with theologian John Milbank’s reflections on secularist heresy to explore the limitations and possibilities of each.