Critique of Black Reason and Negrophilia

The event is organized live within the covid measures for culture.
Cameroonian thinker Achille Mbembe is one of Africa’s most respected and influential historians, political theorists and philosophers. In his book, Critique of Black Reason (Paris, 2013), he provides a precise and informed analysis of the painful problem of humanity that is racism. What is race? How did it come into being; why did it come into being in the first place? Mbembe seeks answers as a historian not only in the realms of the political-legal and economic as he traverses the world of the transatlantic slave trade and the Virginia plantation in his reflections, but he also simultaneously inquires as a philosopher and brilliant diagnostician, descending into the realms of the human unconscious, where he finds race as a deeply embedded mental complex of codified madness. Mbembe examines race from theological, cultural, ethical, and existential perspectives. He subjects it to linguistic analyses, linguistic microscopes, and finds a cluster of the material matrix, symbolic institutions, and psychic components of the politics and consciousness of colonial empire.
In her book Negrophilia (London, 2000), Jamaican art historian and curator Petrine Archer-Straw examines not only the glorious Parisian avant-garde of the 1920s, but above all the coming to terms of European artists and women artists with the “exotic” presence of negroid African culture in the midst of European metropolises. Josephine Baker dancing her “banana dance” in the nightclubs of Paris and Berlin in the then Weimar Republic, the ecstatic jazz concerts of the South African group “The Black Birds”, Sonia Delaunay’s boutiques on the boulevards of Paris offering exotic “black deco” fashion, the Vogue brand offering a perfume called “Fetish” – these are just a few of the many phenomena of Europe’s cultural world at the time, which attempts to come to terms with its racist past, its present (and unfortunately its future), as well as its peculiar negrophilia, which Petrine Archer-Straw locates in the paintings of Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger and Paul Colin, in the furniture of Pierre Legrain, in the jewellery of Jean Dunand, in the photographs of Man Ray, in the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi, and in many others.
Rob Švarc’s lecture will thematically circle around these two extremely important books, which cannot be bypassed today when considering the issues of racism and coming to terms with difference.

VOLUNTARY ADMISSION