This is a summary of the second chapter of Critique of Black reason written by Achilles Mbembe. I just took time to summarise it. Summary author; Bwikizo Felix(Uganda)

1. CRITIQUE OF BLACK REASON
BY
ACHILLES MBEMBE
CHAPTER 2 : THE WELL OF FANTASIES

2. An overview of the chapter
● Africa & Blackness
● What is Africa?
● Figure of the Black Woman
● Construction of Whiteness
● What is modernity?
● Paradox of European Liberalism
● What is the principle of Race?
● What is the principle of Race?
● Historical & spatial
consciousness of the planet
● Separation of the World
● National colonialism & Racism
● French logic of assimilation

3. Africa & Blackness
● Speak one to evoke the other
● Came from creation of subjects
Origin of word“Negre”
● Iberian origin
● French Language- 16th C
● Zenith of use in the 18th C

4. Who is a black man?
● Body – Gigantic – Fantastic
● Membrane – Organ – Smell – Flesh – Meat
● An extraordinary accumulation of sensations
● Man of ore, man of metal, man of metal
● Naturally prehistoric figure
● Imaginary and nothing human being
● Quantifiable merchandise( First called negre)

5. Conti…….
● Species of human being that barely deserved the name
● Most atrocious creature of the human race
● A dark mass
● A penile being(Sword)
● With limited intellectual abilities
● Evoke disparities of human species
● Living symbol of ancient human

6. Conti…….
● Kolossos of the World
Witness to the process of doubling
Substitute for the absent corpse
Occupies the place of the absent corpse
● What black means
● Phantasmagoria(reality of appearances and appearances of reality)
● Product of a process

7. Conti……….
● Mechanism of attribution( Fanon- Nickname)
● Sign of minoritization & confinement
● Absent corpses for which name is a substitute
● Kind of Mnema(hard to separate life from death)
● Major component of the taxonomy of segregation
● Name given to a polygamist

8. What is Africa?
● Land of difference & reservoir of mysteries
● Ultimate kingdom of catharsis & the magico-religious
● Trapped in a childhood
● Primitive society with a savage mentality
● Physical and geographical fact
● Emptiness of a being walled within absolute precariousness
● Mask & hullow sun

9. Conti……..
● Name given to societies that are judged impotent
● Superstitious societies
● Simulacrum of an obscure and blind power
● A mask in the drama contemporary existence
● An empty form that escapes truth & falsehood
● Symbol of what is as much outside as beyond life
● Critique of life as critique of language

10. Conti…...
● A way of posing the political question of the desiccation of life
● Living witness of the scandal of humanity
What it says and hides
What it says without being heard
Responsibility & justice
Object of negation(negrification of the world)
● Described with apparent authority- fiction

11. Figure of the Black Woman
● Played a big role in the articulation of
Racism, frivolity & libertinage
Through the loci of painting, dance & literature
● Black beauties -svelte voluptuousness and hind quarters
-naked breasts and feathered belts
● Most fertile sources of artistic creation for poets
● Ideal hermaphrodite - indolent
- available & submissive

12. Conti……...
● Activated the phantasmagoric impulses of the French male
(white saviour, borders of civilisation, several women, under the
tropics)
● Beauty, nakedness & sensuality
● Casual, libertine, insouciant racism
● Cemented by Josephine Baker's performances
● Baudelaire, Pablo Picasso, George braque

13. Race
● A core principle of the political body during the scramble for
Africa(Hannah Arendt)
● Racism and bureaucracy tightly linked
● An emergency explanation of human being one does not understand

14. Construction of Whiteness
● Constructed as the institutionalisation of legal rights encountered the
regimes of labour & extortion
- fluid distinction between Europeans & Africans(1607)
- similar statues( practices of sociability)
- change towards the last years of the 17th c
- clear difference demarcated between indentured labourers
- Sex relations outlawed and mobility reduces
- Prohibition of carrying arms and muskets given to Europeans

15. Whiteness - Fantasy – Social truth
● All these above determinants explain the power of fantasy of
whiteness
● Cultivation of the belief/ fantasy into a dogma & habitus
- through theological, cultural, political & institutional mechanisms
- its transgression would lead to punishments
● Transformation of whiteness into desired fascination
- constellation of objects of desire
- public signs of privilege( body, image, language & wealth

16. Whiteness therefore became
● Mode of western presence in the world
● Figure of cruelty & brutality
● Singular form of depredation
● Manifestation in the historical epochs and geography contexts
- Genocides & exterminations in the new world
- Slave trade in the Atlantic triangle
- Colonization in Africa, Asia, South America

17. Conti…...
● Apartheid & segregation in Africa
● Pillage, depredation, expansion in the name of capital & profit
● Vernacularization of alienation
+ +++++++ Fantasy of whiteness ++++++
● Draws part of its self-assurance from structural violence
QTN : how does the Atlantic complex differ from the islamic trans-
saharan slave trade and the indian ocean one?
---- Extraction from their slaves a surplus value that let to the process
of accumulation spanning the globe

18. What is modernity?
● Another name for the european project of unlimited expansion
undertaken in the final years of the 15th C
● Triumph of imperialism in the 19th C
● Exercise of despotic power thanks to:
- Technical development
- Military conquests
- Commerce & Christianity
● Power exercised out one’s borders

19. Paradox of European Liberalism
● Forged in parallel with imperial expansion
● Questions about – universalism & individual rights
● - freedom of exchange
● - relationship between ends and means
● Jeremy Bentham, Edmund Burke, Emmanuel Kant, Denis Diderot
Did modernity coincide with the appearance of the principle of race?
● ---Yes; Principle of race as a privileged matrix for the technique of
domination yesterday & today

20. What is the principle of race?
● Spectral form of division & human difference that can be mobilized to
stigmatize or exclude
OR
● A process of segregation through which people seek to isolate,
eliminate or physically destroy a particular human group
Historical & spatial consciousness of the planet
● Rooted in events that began in 15th C up to the partitioning & division
of whole world
● Events were due to migration

21. Why migration occurred?
● Extermination of entire peoples(Americas & Australia)
● Deportations of million of blacks into the new world
- economic system based on slavery
- accumulation of transnational capital
- formation of black diasporas
● Conquest, annexation, subjection of immense lands
- colonisation & imperialism
● Formation of racist states and “indigenization” of colonialist(Afrikaners)

22. Separation of the World
In the interior
● Governed by law & justice( state of law)
● Ideas of property, payment for work, rights of people
● Where civilisation began – cities, empires, commerce developed
● Peace, friendship & treaties
In the exterior
● Free zone of lawlessness, place without rights
● Pillage & ransack in good conscience

23. Conti……..
● Pirates, privateers, buccaneers had free reign
● Actions justified by principles of free trade & freedom to evangelize
● Free zone that had no borders/ fenceless
● No sanctions that could be violated

24. National colonialism and Racism
● Subjectivity – colonial relations -symbolic matrix
● Transformation of the political body of the nation into the political
body of the empire
– assimilation( subject – brother)
– colonial education of the French
v. Psycho-anthropology
v. Racial classification of human species
v. theories of inequality

25. Conti…...
● Formation of racist consciousness
● Colonization as a pathway to a new virility
● Technology of dissemination of difference
v. Newspapers, bulletins, periodicals
v. Scientific societies
v. institutions( museums, human zoos, intl expositions)

26. Conti……..
● National colonialist mov’t (1892) v. brought people of all walks of life
v. lawyers, journalists, committees & clergy
v. contribution as cultural & political
● Pedagogy whose aim was to make them get used to racism
Contribution of Publications
Africa presented as a stupid child
Congenital vice of the black race(idiocy)
Colonization as a form of assistance(gift)

27. Reasons put forward for colonialism
● Settle excess population of France
● Finding outlets for national products
● Accessing raw materials
● Planting the “flag” of civilization
● Spreading the gospel among pagans
● Destroying isolation through introduction of commerce

28. French logic of racial assignation
● Refusal to see, the practice of occultation & denial
● Practice of restoration & disguise
● Tendency towards frivolity & exoticism
French enlightenment
v. Rousseau & Voltaire recognized the vile character of slave trade
v. pretended the ignorance of traffic & chains
v. gesture of ignorance, dialectic distance & indifference

29. The will of ignorance
● Knowing nothing & not worried about learning anything
● Making pronouncements on Africa
● Narratives that flourished in encyclopedia
● Fantasizing to exclude

30. Friendship and civilising mission
● Deeply ambiguous
● Friendship of compassion, of empathy & sympathy
● Subscription to the miserable & sordid condition of the black man
● Their inferiority vs right to abuse their weakness
● Challenged the system of slavery & condemned its effects
● Discourse inscribed with the paradigm of condescendance
- Voltaire, Hugo, Jules Ferry
● “Civilising” mission infused with solidarity

31. PREPARED BY
BWIKIZO FELIX
MAKERERE UNIVERSITY
bwikizofeliches@gmail.com