Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is coeditor of
Laurent Dubois is Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History and Director of the Forum for Scholars and Publics at Duke University.
Epilogue: There Is Only One World
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Published:February 2017
Blackness came into being with the figure of the Black slave, capitalism’s most visible symbol of the possibility of violence without limits and of vulnerability without a safety net. Without restitution, reparation, and a striving toward universal justice, the Becoming Black of the world is fast becoming reality. All of humanity, as coinheritors of the earth, must share in the responsibility to create a world of humans and nonhumans caught, not in global systems of depredation and exploitation, but in communities of mixture, exchange, reciprocity, and mutuality. Universal justice can be achieved only by restoring to the slaves of history their rightful share of humanity stolen centuries ago. The future of humanity relies on attending to the in-common and the reservoirs of life, to the Open rather than the enclosure, and to the recognition of difference as unkinning and inclusion rather than differentiation for profit, exclusion, and domination.
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