Indebtedness and the Curation of a Black Archive: Comments on David Goldberg’s Conversation with Achille Mbembe

Abstract

Addressing Mbembe’s interview with Goldberg and reflecting upon the book – Critique of Black Reason (2017) – that the interview probes, the author points to a tension in Mbembe’s thought. Mbembe apprehends black reason as all-at-once ‘reason’s unreason’ and the remaking-reasonable of reason. In this respect, there is a clear sense of a simultaneity of imposition–struggle and destruction–repair. Yet this ethos of simultaneity is in tension with Mbembe’s sequential exposition of the black archive, especially the indebtedness of the ‘response’ by blacks to the reasoning about blacks. In his response, the author works through the productive tension between ethos and sequence as a way to demonstrate the richness of Mbembe’s curation of a black archive.