Achille Mbembe in conversation with Joshua Comaroff and John May

Professor Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). A co-founder of Les Ateliers de la pensee de Dakar and a major figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory, he has written extensively on contemporary politics and philosophy, including On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001), Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2016), Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019) and Out of the Dark Night. Essays on Decolonization (Columbia University Press, 2020).

Joshua Comaroff, MArch ’01, MLA ’01, is Assistant Professor in Social Sciences at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Comaroff studied literature and creative writing at Amherst College before joining the Master of Architecture and Master of Landscape Architecture programs at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he worked as part of Rem Koolhaas’ Harvard Project on the City.

John May, MARch ’02, RAE ’10, is founding partner, with Zeina Koreitem, in MILLIØNS, an award-winning, Los Angeles-based design practice, and assistant professor of architecture at the Harvard Graduate school of design, where he served as director of the Master in Design Studies program from 2015-2020.