African Political Thought · Unit 10
Contemporary African Philosophy: Appiah and Mbembe
One philosopher arguing the whole tradition's founding racial category doesn't hold up, another diagnosing a darker form of power the tradition's founders never had to name
This unit examines two of the most influential living voices in African and Africana philosophy, working in genuinely different registers on the material this course has traced from its opening units. Kwame Anthony Appiah, whose father moved in Nkrumah's own political circle, argues directly that Pan-Africanism and Negritude alike depend on a concept of race that does not survive serious philosophical scrutiny, proposing 'rooted cosmopolitanism' as an alternative foundation for solidarity. Achille Mbembe extends Michel Foucault's theory of biopower into a darker register he calls necropolitics, the power to decide who is allowed to die, arguing this concept, not mere economic exploitation, best explains the colony's and the postcolony's deepest structure of domination.
Learning Objectives
- •Students will be able to explain Kwame Anthony Appiah's critique that Pan-Africanism and Negritude depend on a biologically incoherent concept of race, and evaluate his proposed alternative of 'rooted cosmopolitanism.'
- •Students will analyze Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics as an extension of Michel Foucault's biopower, and explain what Mbembe argues Foucault's original framework fails to capture.
- •Students will evaluate the scholarly critique that Mbembe's necropolitics may not constitute a genuinely distinct modality of power from Foucault's own framework, weighing this counter-argument directly.
- •Students will synthesize Appiah's and Mbembe's distinct contemporary projects as two different responses to the same body of African political thought this course has traced, one questioning the tradition's foundational racial category, the other extending its analysis of colonial power into the present.