Many reviews and blurbs of “Critique of Black Reason” by Achille Mbembe note it as “challenging” or “demanding.” While not an easy read, a large part of the difficulty of the text emerges from its lack of structure and overall argumentative coherence, leaving one to feel as if one is reading a collection of disparate thoughts brought together in book form.

Mbembe sets out to write a genealogy of Blackness, or to pick apart Black Reason – that phenomenon of fantasy and ignorant apprehension surrounding the epistemology of the Black subject, Blackness, and Africa. However, the path often gets lost and at times it became unclear if I was reading a poor version of Paul Gilroy, a literary review of African novelists, or a history of French colonization. Clarity in the text also suffers from Mbembe’s reluctance or inability to ontologically situate Blackness, preferring to make insinuations or allow others to comment on being/nonbeing, subject/object, life/death, etc., without staking out his own claim. This makes his epistemological task all the more difficult, as it rests on unsure footing. Lastly, of course a book will be difficult when there are statements in the text that simply do not make sense or hold any water without the providing of further explication or supporting evidence, which is not offered.

There are other issues with the text, such as the focus on the nineteenth century as the key moment for racial construction, the gendering throughout of the Black Man (Hortense Spillers would like a word), and deploying as critique that which he is critiquing – namely speaking in a universalizing manner about Africa en toto or the ostensible experiences of all colonized peoples.

While I have been harsh in this review, the book is certainly not without merit and has poignant moments of analysis, in particular around colonization. It also ends in a spirit of hope and gestures towards the future, which I don’t share, but some people like that sort of thing.