This talk considers a seeming contradiction in Achille Mbembe’s recent thinking on planetary questions and the place of Africa therein. On the one hand, his calls to planetary conviviality are voiced in the language of humanity as an unfinished project, what I call a “nevertheless humanism” because it sidesteps myriad recent critiques. On the other hand, his account of Blackness posits racialization as a process of thingification in the service of extraction: plantation slavery was the engine of capitalism whose calculations created a “progression from man-of-ore to man-of-metal to man-of-money.” What, then, are the implications of Mbembe’s persistently humanist call to “share” the world, when he posits human/nonhuman relations as both the engine of Black disposability and the only path to planetary survival? Comparing Mbembe’s accounts of silt and ore (the former oriented toward life, the latter toward death), I demonstrate the ambivalence about fossil energy and the relation between metaphor and materiality recurrent in his recent thought, which is deeply indebted to Frantz Fanon.

Jennifer Wenzel is jointly appointed in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies. She is an affiliate of the Columbia Climate School.

Her first book, Bulletproof: Afterlives of Anticolonial Prophecy in South Africa and Beyond, published by Chicago and KwaZulu-Natal in 2009, was awarded Honorable Mention for the Perkins Prize by the International Society for the Study of Narrative. With Imre Szeman and Patricia Yaeger, she co-edited Fueling Culture: 101 Words for Energy and Environment (Fordham 2017). Her recent monograph, The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature (Fordham 2020), was a Finalist for the 2020 Book Prize by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) and was shortlisted for the 2022 Ecocriticism Book Prize awarded by the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. As part of the After Oil Collective, she co-authored Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice (Minnesota Forerunners Series, 2022). Her essays on postcolonial theory, environmental and energy humanities, memory studies, and African and South Asian literatures, have appeared in journals including Alif, Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, PMLA, Postcolonial Studies, Public Culture, Research in African Literatures, Resilience, and Substance. She has held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation, ACLS, NEH, and Princeton University's Davis Center for Historical Studies. She is currently at work on a new book project, "The Fossil-Fueled Imagination: How (and Why) to Read for Energy."