The Earthly Community

“The Earthly Community is a magnificent culmination of Achille Mbembe’s sustained interrogation of power, violence, and the possibilities of human freedom. Moving from the devastations of colonial modernity to the transformations wrought by planetary computation and ecological crisis, Mbembe develops an audacious philosophy of life in common. His reflections on vulnerability, interdependence, memory, and repair offer a compelling alternative to the brutalities and exclusions of our present. Written with remarkable intellectual intensity and imaginative reach, this is a book that does more than interpret our planetary condition: it challenges us to invent another way of inhabiting the Earth.” - Felwine Sarr, Anne-Marie Bryan Distinguished Professor of Romances Studies, Duke University

“Earthly Community imagines a form of relationality responsive to the brutality of our moment on a planet nearing extinction. This planetary community is ecologically, cosmologically, philosophically and politically conceived from the African continent with its complex histories of enslavement and colonialism. Pushing against the global system in which bodies become biological fuel or subject to insurance negotiation, Achille Mbembe extends a body of work ranging from Tutuola to Leiris, from Dogon ethnographies and from Césaire and Glissant, that reimagines partition and division as distinction and sharing, proposes the necessary dissolution of subject and object in colonial thought structures, and imagines a shared relation to the planet we occupy with all living things.” - Ranjana Khanna, author of Asylum: The Concept and the Practice