ACHILLE MBEMBE

Africa in the New Century

RITING ABOUT AFRICA in 1830-1831,this is what Georg Hegel,

W the great German philosopher,had to say: "The peculiarly African
character is difficult to comprehend, for the very reason that in reference to
it,we must quite give up the principle which naturally accompanies all our
ideas-the category of Universality. In Negro life,the characteristic point is
the fact that consciousness has not yet attained to the realization of any sub­
stantial objective existence-as for example,God,or Law-in which the
interest of man's volition is involved and in which he realizes his own being. "
Originally presented in a lecture series and later compiled in The Phi­
losophy of History (first published in German in 1837), Hegel adds: "The
Negro . . . exhibits the natural man in his completely wild and untamed
state. We must lay aside all thought of reverence and morality-all that
we call feeling-if we would rightly comprehend him. There is nothing
harmonious with humanity to be found in this type of character. " Hegel
then promises himself not to ever mention Africa again,for "it is no his­
torical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. "
What we properly understand by Africa,he concludes,"is the Unhistorical,
Undeveloped Spirit,still involved in the conditions of mere nature. "
More than a century after Hegel's ruminations,Robert D. Kaplan,a
U.S. journalist and policy pundit,published "The Coming Anarchy," a
devastating portrayal of West Africa in the February 1994 issue of the U.S.
monthly magazine The Atlantic. The Cold War had just ended and most
of the Western world was triumphantly riding on the crest of a wave of
optimism. Celebrating this triumph-of the West and of what he called
the Western idea-Francis Fukuyama, writing in a 1989 issue of The
National Interest, an American bimonthly international affairs magazine,
suggested, "what we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold
War,or the passing of a particular period of post-war history,but the end
of history as such. " By "the end of history as such," Fukuyama did not
simply mean the end point of mankind's ideological evolution. More
fundamentally,he meant the reconciliation of the market principle and
the idea of freedom,and "the un.iversalization of western liberal democ­
racy as the final form of human government. "

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And yet, projecting himself to the day and times after history had
ended, Fukuyama could only see melancholia and sadness, a profound
nostalgia for the Hegelian world: "The end of history will be a very sad
time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a
purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth
daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic
calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental
concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the
post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the
perpetual caretaking of the nmseum of human history."
As Fukuyama wrote his epitaph to history, Africa was in the midst of a
spectacular collision. Apartheid and white minority rule were coming to a
formal end in South Africa, while a genocide of cataclysmic proportions
was unfolding in Rwanda. Liberation and the apotheosis of long years
of struggle on the one hand, self-destruction on the other. Declining
per capita incomes and production, low levels of savings and investment,
slow growth in agricultural production, failing export earnings, strangled
imports and unserviceable foreign debt burdens-all plagued most of
sub-Saharan Ar
f ica.
In his scenario for the twenty-first century, Kaplan argued that West
Africa in particular was becoming "the symbol of worldwide demographic,
environmental and societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the
real 'strategic' danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity
of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and
international borders, and the empowerment of private annies, security
firn1S, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated
through a West African prism." In Kaplan's geography-just as in Hegel's a
century earlier-West Africa became the epitome of those regions of the
world where central governments were withering away, tribal and regional
fiefdo111S were on the rise, and war had turned pervasive.
West Africa, Kaplan argued, was reverting "to the Africa of the Victo­
rian atlas. " He added: "It consists now of a series of coastal trading posts,
such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior that, owing to violence,
volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham Greene once observed,
'blank' and 'unexplored. ' "Kaplan invoked the English political economist
Thomas Malthus, describing him as "the philosopher of demographic
doomsday" and a "prophet" of West Africa 's future. "And West Africa's
future, eventually, will also be that of most of the rest of the world . . . in
an age of cultural and racial clash."

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This apocalyptic view of Africa's future was echoed in 2000 when,

building upon Hegelian tropes once again, the influential UK financial
weekly The Economist declared that Africa was "hopeless." In a famous edi­
torial, titled "Hopeless Continent," it conjured up images of destitution,
failure and despair, floods and famine, poverty and pestilence, brutality,
despotism and corruption, dreadful wars and plunder, rape, cannibalism,
amputation, and even the weather to suggest that Africa's future was defi­
nitely doomed. Foreign aid workers, peacekeeping missions, humanitarian
agencies, and the world at large might as well give up, so deeply "buried in
their cultures" were the reasons for so much human misery, it concluded.

As I WRITE, poverty and unemployment are still widespread on the

continent, in some instances more so than in other emerging markets.
In many quarters of the rich world, Africa, with its apparently never­
ending tales of disease and disorder, still inspires pity and disbelief, when
it does not elicit deeply held humanitarian and philanthropic impulses­
and the contempt that usually comes with them. People still struggle to
make ends meet-but these days, where don't they? They still demand
products that could be both cheap and reliable. Needs are still obvious.
Scarcity is still a fact. They don't always have enough to eat. They may
lack education. They may despair at daily injustices, and some want to
emigrate. Many still fear a violent or premature end.
But that's not all.
Secondary-school enrollment has grown by 48 percent between 2000
and 2008. Over the past decade, malaria deaths in some of the worst­
affected countries have declined by 30 percent and HIV infections by
up to 74 percent. Life expectancy across Africa has increased by about
10 percent and child mortality rates in most countries have been falling
steeply. Over the past ten years, real income per person has increased by
more than 30 percent, whereas in the previous twenty years it shrank by
nearly 10 percent. Only 20 percent of the continent's one billion people
are online, but that share is rising rapidly as mobile networks are rolled
out and the cost oflnternet-capable devices continues to fall. As a matter
of fact, more than 720 million Africans have mobile phones and a hundred
million were on Facebook by 2014.
Mobile telephony in particular has revolutionized the ways Africans
interact and the way small and medium enterprises, farmers, and informal
traders operate. As a result, mobile revenue is today equivalent to 3.7 per­
cent of African GDP-more than triple its share in developed economies,

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where it was an incremental innovation. Were the Internet eventually to

match or exceed the level of impact mobile telephony has already achieved,
it could contribute some $300 billion to Africa's GDP by 2025, according
to a 2011 report by the consultancy finn McKinsey. It is calculated that, in
this leapfrog scenario, increased Internet penetration and use could propel
private consumption almost thirteen times higher than current levels of
$12 billion, reaching some $154 billion by 2025.

LET ME TAKE another example: the transformations that are affecting

urban forms. These have been caused partly by the emergence, on the
continent, of megacities and megaregions whose density, massive spatial
expansion, sheer scale of population, high levels of risk, and great wealth
disparities have been accompanied by dynamic and unexpected modes
of urban growth. Major cities such as Lagos, Johannesburg, Kinshasa,
Nairobi, Luanda, Dakar, and Abidjan have continued to expand in a rela­
tively uncontrolled, decentralized if not random way since the 1980s.
Today, these cities are better understood as largely deterritorialized mega­
regions with multiple urban enclaves.
Their myriad public spaces are increasingly privatized. Novel patterns
of transregional migration, settlement, and high consumption are trans­
forming their economic and cultural fabric, paving the way for highly
stylized and hybrid or creolized forms. Visible and invisible networks of
social and economic exchange participate in, but are also separate from,
the mainstream flows of global capital, real and fictitious. One of their
defining features is not only their disjunctive social geography, but also
the way in which humans and nonhumans are linked together in het­
erogeneous and often unrecognized assemblages that contribute to the
making of a unique urban civilization. More than at any other time in
their recent history, these megaregions are the direct outcome of new so­
cioeconomic forms as well as a different politics of human/nonhuman/
techno-ecological relations.
Let's consider, furthermore, what is going on in contemporary African
art. In the Hegelian paradigm, there is obviously no such thing as "Af­
rican contemporary art." Were it to exist, it would have neither authors
nor concepts, only ethnicities and their fetishes. It is enough to place
completely trivial domestic objects or ceremonial objects in a museum
or a gallery for them to be transformed into objects of art. In any case,
the fact is that since the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who nominated
preexisting consumer objects as art, there are no longer works [oeuvres]

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as such in the West. Duchamp signed the death of the work of art in the
classical sense of the term. There is no longer any image to isolate or to
capture. Or at least there is no longer anything to interpret. There are
only selections to be made and collections of objects to be assembled,
curated, and exhibited.
Since Duchamp, one might say that the act of giving form, of anima­
tion, has moved to the background. When the West "discovers" l'art negre
(Negro art) at the beginning of the twentieth century, before all else it
is fascinated by what it forgot-that image and form did not need to
be separated; in fact, they could be reconciled in the object, and their
reconciliation in the object is what endowed them both with a singular
animating power. Thus the vitalist construction of African objects at the
beginning of the twentieth century.
The magic of the arts of Africa and its diaspora has always derived
from its power of dematerialization, its capacity to inhabit the common­
place and sensible, precisely with the aim of transforming it into an idea
and an event. Historically it has come from an unambiguous recognition
of the fact that the infinite cannot be captured in a form. The infinite
exceeds every form -even if, from time to time, it passes through form,
that is, through the finite. But what fundamentally characterizes form is
its own finitude. Form can only be ephemeral, evanescent, and fugitive.
"To form" is to inhabit a space of essential fragility and vulnerability.
This is the reason why caring and nurturing life are the main functions
of the arts.
The idea of art as an attempt to capture the forces of the infinite; an
attempt to put the infinite in sensible form, but a forming that consists
in constantly doing, undoing, and redoing; assembling, disassembling, and
reassembling-this idea is typically "African." It fully resonates with the
digital spirit of our times. This is why there is a good chance that the art of
the twenty-first century will be Afropolitan.
Whatever the case, today another cultural geography of the world is
in the making. Whether one likes it or not, Africa is firmly writing itself
within a new, decantered yet global history of the arts. It is breaking with
the ethnological paradigms that will have corseted it into primitivism or
neoprimitivism. More and more, the term "Africa" itself tends to refer to
ageo-aesthetic category. Africa being above all the body of a vast diaspora, it
is by definition a body in motion, a deterritorialized body constituted in
the crucible of various forms of migrancy. Its arts objects too, are above
all objects in motion, coming straight out of a fluctuating imaginary.

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Such too is African modernity-a migrant form of modernity, born out

of overlapping genealogies, at the intersections of multiple encounters
with multiple elsewheres.
Indeed if modern art is a response to the crisis of the image, it is possible
that this crisis is at the point of being resolved by contemporary Afro­
diasporic creation. Afro-diasporic creation is the vehicle that will allow us
to escape from the crisis of the idea of the image opened up by modern art.

As WE ENTER the twenty-first century, the Hegelian mythology-and

its multiple actualizations-manifestly no longer holds. This mythology
is now firmly unraveling. Something else is going on. It is being picked
up both by Africans themselves and, curiously enough, by the world of
high finance. A tacit consensus is emerging around the idea that after
China, what is going on in Africa will have a huge impact not only on
Africa as such, but on our planet. The emerging tacit consensus is that
the destiny of our planet will be played out, to a large extent, in Africa. If there
is one single idea I wish you to take from this intervention, this is it. This
planetary turn of the African predicament will constitute the main cultural and
philosophical event ofthe twenty-first century. It will take us far away from the
Hegelian myths I cited at the start of this lecture.
This planetary turn is the result of an ongoing-not yet entirely mani­
fest-conceptual shift about which I would like to make three comments.
Firstly, that Africa is gradually perceived as the place where our planetary
future is at stake-or is being played out-is due to the fact that, all
around the world and especially in Africa itself, older senses of time and
space based on linear notions of development and progress are being re­
placed by newer senses of time and of futures founded on open narrative
models. Secondly, within the continent itself, Africa's future is more and
more thought of as full of unactualized possibilities, of would-be worlds,
of potentiality. Many increasingly believe that through self-organization
and small ruptures, we can actually create myriad "tipping points" that
may lead to deep alterations of the direction the continent is taking.
Thirdly, in fact, it has of late been a matter of tacit consensus, especially
among international financial institutions and experts, that Africa repre­
sents the last frontier of capitalism.
While this last claim is contested in various quarters, there is neverthe­
less ample evidence to support it. Two examples will suffice.
The first relates to an obvious fact: Africa's economic pulse has been quick­
ening during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Real GDP rose by 4. 9

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percent per year from 2000 through 2008, more than twice its pace in
the 1980s and 1990s. Telecommunications, banking, retailing, and con­
struction are flourishing, even booming. P rivate investment flows are
surging. From $9 billion in 2000, foreign direct investment increased
to $62 billion in 2008-relative to GDP, this is almost as large as the
flows into China. Africa's collective GDP, at $1.6 trillion in 2008, is now
roughly equal to Brazil's or Russia's. The continent is among the world's
most rapidly growing economic regions.
Even more cmcial to the ongoing transfomutions is the rise efthe middle­
class consumer. Today, 40 percent of the continent's one billion people live
in cities, a proportion roughly comparable to China's and larger than
India's. It is estimated that by 2035, that share will rise to 50 percent and
Africa's top eighteen cities will have a combined spending power of $1. 3
trillion. In 2000, roughly 59 million households on the continent had
$5,000 or more in income above which they start spending roughly half
of it on nonfood items. By 2014, the number of such households had
reached 106 million. Today, Africa already has more middle-class house­
holds (defined as those with incomes of $20,000 or above) than India.
P rivate consumption rose by $568 billion from 2000 to 2010. From 2012
to 2020, consumer-facing industries are expected to grow a further $410
billion.
But Africa represents the last frontier ef capitalism in another, second
sense. It is, against all odds, a region of our world where some ef the most far­
reaching formal and informal experiments in neoliberal deregulation have been
taking place. Suffice it to mention, in this regard, the structural adjustment
programs of the mid-1980s and their cohort of austerity measures coun­
tries such as Greece are now saddled with. During those years, Africa
was a laboratory where some of the ideas and practices that would later
be brought back to and implemented in parts of Europe were originally
tested. Such was the case of the idea that the duty of governments is to
install, impose, and enforce market relations wherever possible; or that
political intervention in the economy must refrain from redistribution,
except from the bottom to the top, to create incentives for growth, the
assumption being that people at the top work more if they pay lower
taxes on higher incomes, whereas people at the bottom work more if
their social security is taken away and their wages lowered.
These were also the years when, under the guidance of the IMF and
World Bank, Africa e>..'Perimented with the idea that public provision should
be replaced with private purchases and growth is the result of income

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flowing to the already rich. Both the satisfaction of needs and the servic­
ing of wants were subjected to the movement of markets, sociation by
consumption and naked cash became the dominant mode of social inte­
gration. From then on, citizenship was bound to look structurally similar
to customership, and political relations like market relations.
Even more decisively, this is the region of the world where the relation­
ship between transnational extractive projects-which underpin most of
Africa's economic growth during the late twentieth and early twenty-first
century-and the transformations of contemporary global financial capi­
talism (especially under the sign of clandestine economies, enclave econ­
omies, and offshoring) have been the most perversely tested. During the
last decade, Africa made its greatest-ever contribution of "illicit" financial
outflows and net income payments to the rest of the world. A 2013 African
Development Bank report estimated that between 1980 and 2009, the
economies of Africa lost between $597 billion and $1.4 trillion in net
resource transfers away from the continent. In comparative terms, sub­
Saharan Africa's net income payments are almost three times those of the
Euro zone and five times greater than those of China or India.1
One important implication of these transformations has been the ex­
tent to which they have influenced almost everything from household
economics to environmental disruptions, scientific expertise to state gov­
ernance. Another, and possibly even more important, implication has been
the extent to which these kinds of transnational operations disentangle the
production of profit from the place in which the industry happens to find
itself, while structuring liability and responsibility in such a way that the
firms involved can remove themselves from local social, legal, political, and
environmental entanglements.
As sites of experimentation, Africa's extractive economies have been
deeply involved in-and will keep contributing to-the shaping of key
aspects of contemporary financial capitalism. For instance, they have con­
tributed to the remaking of the corporate form at the global scale-the
structures and conditions of corporate activity and what it means to in­
corporate in the first years of the twenty-first century. The monetization
of risk-a key structural feature of contemporary futures markets-has
been shaped to a large extent by experiments with new forms on the
African continent. So have been offshoring (including of the means of
violence) , private contracting (including of security services) , gambling,
other economically stigmatized activities, and various innovations in the
field of tax avoidance. W hatever the case, the current African moment

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can therefore be characterized as a moment of acceleration. Africa is now

perceived not as the empty cipher of Hegelian mythology, but as likely
to become a significant source ef rising global consumption.

IF INDEED THE CURRENT African moment can be characterized as a

moment of acceleration, the question is acceleration towards what? What are
the forces behind it? Is such a historical trajectory sustainable? At what
cost, and who is likely to pay for it, or to benefit from it? Acceleration, I
would say, towards a kind of capitalism that is mostly disjointed, almost
galactic in the sense that it consists of a seemingly random collection of
disconnected enclaves. These enclaves are incongruously linked together
in a contrived form that cannot be easily grasped within the conven­
tional analytical paradigms. It is a capitalism of multiple nodal points, of
scattered patterns, of spatial growth combined with neglect and decline.
This form of capitalism is mostly extractive.
It is a frontier-type of capitalism organized around enclaves (especially
mining enclaves) , islands, and bubbles. It will continue to profit from long­
term rising global demand for oil, natural gas, minerals, food, and arable
land. In any case, over the next decade, the world's liquid-fuel consumption
will increase by 25 percent-twice the pace of the 1990s. Projections of
demand for many hard minerals show similar growth. Meanwhile, Africa
boasts an abundance of riches: 10 percent of the world's reserves of oil, 40
percent of its gold, 80 to 90 percent of the chromium and the platinum
metal group. Those are just the known reserves. More lie undiscovered.
The development of this form of capitalism in Africa is a key aspect
of the world-historical shift in the fortunes of humanity that is now
under way by dint of the rise of China (and India) . What characterizes
the unfolding of capitalism in China is its "compressed" nature. It is the
fact that a fundamental shift of national economic structures occurred in
the 1970s mainly through, firstly, a large industrial sector rapidly absorb­
ing low-wage migrant labor into manufacturing for a large-scale export
market, and, secondly, through state investment in critical sectors. The
later shift deepened the industrial sector and consequently raised wages,
leading to increased inequalities and social polarization.
Furthermore, a steady stream of migrant labor has been freed from the
countryside as a result of land appropriation-legal or illegal, violent or
peaceful. The flow of rural residents to urban areas is officially regulated
through the hukou registration system that requires would-be migrants to
seek approval from local authorities to move to a new area.

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Advanced forms of accumulation, such as high-value manufacturing,

high-value services, and innovation-led econornic expansion in a global
setting coexist with primitive forms of accumulation and a vast agrarian
sector. The increasing technological complexity in the structure of its
economy, in addition to contributing to growth and rising incomes, is
fast adding to the pool of precarious employment due to displacement
of labor, hiring of contract labor, and the increasing structural power of
capital.2
Whatever the case, China has for now become a far more prominent
actor than others in the future-making of Africa, to the point where Africa
is now not only a planetary question, as I was intimating earlier on, but also and
more specifically a Chinese question.
But what aspects of Chinese capitalism are being externalized in Africa?
We cannot stress enough the multiplicity of transformational outcomes
arising from China's involvement in Africa. Those transformations will
run in multiple directions and in complex combinations. China has be­
come the workshop of the world with labor-absorbing, export-oriented
manufacturing sectors aiming to upgrade to high-value, capital-intensive
manufacturing.
The African trajectory is far from being based on export-oriented in­
dustrialization. In some regions of the continent, land transfers are on the
rise, the result of wholesale expropriation of land by real estate specula­
tors, large corporations in the natural resource business, and by state-led
infrastructure development. But the process of primitive accumulation is
far from having acquired the intensity it reached in China.
Africa, like China, comprises an urban labor market with informal,
casual work and self-employment, along with precarious, short-term,
poorly paid, and insecure jobs. This market offers a plethora of low-cost
commodities and services. If in China petty commodity producers act
as a reserve army that big global and national capital may deploy and
exclude when needed to support their worldwide accumulation, such is
not the case in Africa.
China's entry into Africa-or Chinese externalization, as I prefer to
describe it-is largely driven by state-run enterprises. For now the glob­
ally active Chinese companies, particularly in terms of investment, are
the predominantly state-owned ones in energy, mining, and construc­
tion. Chinese externalization is accompanied by many of the harsh labor
conditions associated with European industrialization and expansion.
The benefits of Chinese investment for local employment are equivocal.

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Chinese managers prefer to use imported (and effectively indentured and

contractually tied) workers from China. The latter often live in separate
compounds and have almost no relationship with local communities. And
yet China's presence in Africa links to the dynamism of small-scale indig­
enous capital in many ways. Capital goods and business systems emerging
from China are particularly appropriate for small-scale African entrepre­
neurs. This includes low-cost motorcycles and solar chargers, cheap and
easily repairable tractors, and other types of mechanized farming equip­
ment, machinery for packaging, metalworking, and woodworking, and
capital goods used in a wide variety of industries.

PEOPLE ACROSS THE CONTINENT have been living with and adapting
to a high degree of climate variability and its associated risks for centu­
ries. Yet the accelerated changes in the climate and increasing incidence
of climatic disasters during the twentieth century have brought risks into
sharper focus. They threaten to erode Africa's natural assets (land pro­
ductivity, livestock, water, and energy resources) and capabilities (health,
nutrition, education) while keeping the region in a low human develop­
ment trap.
This scenario is exacerbated by the continent's natural fragility. Two­
thirds of its surface area is desert or dry land. Its terrestrial and coastal
ecosystems are highly exposed to natural disasters. The region's livelihoods
and economic activities are very dependent on natural resources and
rain-fed agriculture. The spread of malaria to higher elevations because
of rising temperatures compounds the effects of climate change with an
increasing disease burden. Its forest coverage has shrunk by 10 percent
between 1990 and 2005. Reduced rainfall, soil degradation, and the de­
pletion of precious natural resources is happening in a context in which
two-thirds of sub-Saharan Africans make a living from the environment.
The economic, social, migratory, and security impacts of this vulnerability
on the rest of the world cannot be ignored-the continent will be home
to over two billion inhabitants in 2050.
The continent is central to the global environmental crisis and holds
some of the most potent solutions to the global ecological trap overshad­
owing the twenty-first century. Although its forest coverage has shrunk,
Africa is home to the second largest mass of tropical forest in the world.
The carbon storage capacity of African biotopes is considerable. At a time
when global emissions are rapidly rising, this gigantic carbon capture
machine is-like agricultural land-one of the essential elements of

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climate control. To preserve these natural resources and to exploit the

vast potential of the continent's renewable energies have costs.

LET ME END where I started: with Hegel, that is, with race and racism,
and the future of the human species in this post-Hegelian age and the
planetary turn of the African predicament. Race has once again reentered
the domain of biological truth, viewed now through a molecular gaze. A
new molecular deployment of race has emerged out of genomic thinking.
Worldwide, we witness a renewed interest in terms of the identifica­
tion of biological differences. In these times of global migrations, many
are entertaining the dream of "nations without strangers. " Genomics has
injected new complexity into the figure of the human. And yet the core
racial typology of the nineteenth century still provides the dominant
lens through which this new genetic knowledge of human difference is
understood-and, indeed, is taking shape and entering medical and lay
conceptions of human variation.
Fundamental to ongoing rearticulations of race and recoding of rac­
ism are developments in the life sciences. I already mentioned genomics.
I should add our renewed understanding of the cell, neuroscience, and
synthetic biology. The last quarter of the twentieth century has seen the
rise of a molecular and neuro-molecular style of thought that analyzes all
living processes in body and brain in terms of the material properties of
cellular components, such as DNA bases, ion channels, membrane poten­
tials and the like. This process started during the first half of the twentieth
century and reached its momentum during its last quarter-and continues
to wield influence in the twenty-first century.
It is a process that has been rendered even more powerful by its con­
vergence with two parallel developments. The first is the emergence of
the digital technologies of the information age and the second is the
financialization of the economy. These developments have in turn shaped
two sets of consequences. On the one hand, there is a renewed preoccu­
pation with the future of life itself, and on the other, capital is doing new
work under contemporary conditions. Thanks to the work of capital, we
are no longer fundamentally different from things. We turn them into
persons. We fall in love with them. We are no longer only persons, or we
have never been only persons.
We now realize that there is probably more to the idea of race than even
Hegel imagined. New configurations of racism are emerging worldwide.
Because race-thinking increasingly entails profound questions about the

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nature of the human species in general, the need to rethink the politics
of racialization and the terms under which the struggle for racial justice
unfolds-here and elsewhere in the world-today has become ever more
urgent. Racism is still acting as a constitutive supplement to nationalism.
How do we create a world beyond nationalism? Behind the veil of neutral­
ity and impartiality, racial power still structurally depends on various legal
regimes for its reproduction. How do we radically transform the law?
Even more ominously, race politics is taking a genomic turn. In order
to invigorate antiracist thought and praxis, and in order to reanimate the
project of nonracialism, we particularly need to explore the emerging
nexus between biology, genes, technologies, and their articulations with
new forms of human destitution. At stake in the contemporary recon­
figurations and mutations of race and racism is the splitting of humanity
itself into separate species and subspecies as a result of market libertarian­
ism and genetic technology.
Also at stake, once again, are the old questions of who is whom, who
can make what kinds of claims on whom, and on what grounds, and
who is to own whom, and what. In a contemporary neoliberal order that
claims to have gone beyond the racial, the struggle for racial justice must
take new forms.
But simply looking to past and present, local and global re-articulations
of race will not suffice. To tease out alternative possibilities for thinking
about life and human futures in this age of neoliberal individualism, we
need to connect in entirely new ways the project of nonracialism to that
of human mutuality. In the last instance, nonracialism is truly about radical
sharing and universal inclusion. It is about humankind ruling in common
on behalf of a larger commons, which includes nonhumans-this is the
proper name for democracy. In this sense, nonracialism is the antithesis of
the rule of the market. The domination of politics by capital has resulted
in the waste of countless human lives and the production in every corner
of the globe of vast stretches of dead water and dead land.
To reopen the future of our planet to all who inhabit it, we will have
to learn how to share it again, among but also between its human and
nonhuman inhabitants, between the multiple species that populate our
planet. It is only under these conditions that, aware of our precariousness
as a species in the face of ecological threats, we will be able to overcome
the outright possibility of human extinction opened up by this new epoch,
the age of the Anthropocene.

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NOTES
1 Sylla, Ndongo Samba. "From a marginalized to an emerging Africa? A critical
analysis," Review of African Political Economy, 41, no 1 (2014).
2 D'Costa, Anthony P. "Compressed Capitalism and Development," Critical Asian
Studies 46, no. 2 (2014).

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Chancellor K11111ble R. Subbas111amy 20T 5, Ernest Allen, Jr. photograph

Rowland Abiod1m 2015, Jon Crispin photograph

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]ohnnetta Cole (video) 2015, John Solem photograph

Stephen Clingman 2015, Jon Crispin photograph

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Ekwueme Michael Thelwell 20 I 5, Jon Crispin photograph

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Joye Bowman 2015, ErnestAllen, Jr. photograph

Symposium attendees 2015, ErnestAllen, Jr. photograph

Patrick Mensah 2015, ErnestAllen,Jr. photograph

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Esther Terry 20 r 5, Jon Crispin photograph

Maaza Mmgiste, Ch.11111 a Nivokolo, Ch.inelo Okparan.ta, Sabin.a Murray 20 I 5,

Jon Crispin photograph

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Jules Chametzky 20 1 5, Jon Crispin photograph

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Okey Ndibe 2015, Jon Crispin photograph

Achille Mbe111be 20 r 5, Jon Crispin photograph

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Caryl Phillips, Chika Unigwe, Okey Ndibe 2015, Jon Crispin photograph

D1: Chidi Achebe a11d Dr. Maureen Oka111- Achebe 2015, Jon Crispin photograph

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