Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe is the philosopher of the margin made center. Born in Cameroon in 1957, trained in Paris and now based at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, he has spent thirty years developing a framework for understanding how the structures of colonial power persist, mutate, and reproduce themselves through apparently post-colonial and even emancipatory forms. His necropolitics—the sovereign power to determine who lives and who dies, extended from the physical body to the epistemic body of knowledge and culture—his analysis of plantation logic—the organization of production around the extraction of maximum value from labor rendered simultaneously essential and invisible—and his concept of the becoming-Black of the world—the extension of conditions once reserved for the colonized to an ever-wider circle of humanity through the apparently race-neutral mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism—constitute an indispensable lens for reading the AI moment from