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ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
it seems that mbembe can't resist adding a beautiful voice to the many comprising the generalized blah provisionally designated "afropessimism,"ќ if mostly through insinuation, even if there's some dust on the designation at this point. this might be career self-preservation as mbembe kinda can be insinuated to join the blue fugue fog the keyword now that it has fallen out of vogue. it's just as well as others have insinuated that mbembe's popular treatment of agamben in "necropolitics"ќ comports very well with the keyword's overall assertions of the black/slave's lack of agency. mbembe is at home exposing the gory viscera of colonialism regardless, naturally. under what obligation does he need to acknowledge other afropessimist thinkers really? anxiety of canon formation, spillers and wynter, or somesuch. it's hard to not see what mbembe presents as some kind of distillatory attempt, a summary. but this antiblackness is foundational; can't we even get a shout out to lewis gordon? we do get fabien eboussi boulaga, and i'm grateful for the opportunity for another frustrated library scouring. *critique of black reason* is a little UN auditorium TED-talky, but i don't mind, i mean we should be so lucky, all of us, every last single one of us. like he did this beautiful labor of culling historical sources that sound remarkably like what traffics social media now. or what's really happening?: why do i project those contemporary attitudes onto these 19th century citations? time and memory play a role here in what unites crummell with fanon, in an overall inconoclastic social compulsion. this trip, the context within which countless eurocentric fantasies structure black becoming must be sundered by the thinking of a different thought. and also, one can't excuse yet i ask that one excuses the androcentric langauge as a symptom structuring (intentionally imprecise causality) modern philosophy, black political life. any citational ambition is beset with archive's proclivities, but i would want to push for more, but there you have it; maybe mbembe is aware? truth, i wasn't exactly coming to mbembe for patriarchy-crushing, but.
marianne_maschine's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0
indiaje's review
4.0
had to skim through most of it, but even if i had read it closely, a large part of it would've gone over my head. but an important book
eleonorabasty's review against another edition
3.0
Mi sembra un'estensione (un po' fallita) del pensiero di Fanon, che viene apertamente citato in questa raccolta di essays almeno 80 volte. Molte idee e spesso confuse.
mattrohn's review against another edition
2.0
The best parts of this book are the reviews of the work of other theorists who write far more coherently. Many parts of the history of colonization which the book relies upon as its basis for the origins of racism and race thinking, which much of the rest of its theory rely on for coherence, are empirically false. This is the real problem with this book, that it involves many plausible sounding explanations while being incredibly unconcerned about how we could even though if these ideas are true, let alone whether they actually are. In the occasional parts where the theory is specific enough to actually be mapped onto real events, it fails the test against reality as often as not
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