Achille Mbembe

''It is true that the first chapters pay attention to the historical processes by which “blackness” was invented as a presumably “ontological” category, in any case as a legal category, as a social status, and more importantly as the hole into which the distinction between the human and the non-human vanishes. Various technologies and dispositifs were mobilized in turning these acts of imagination into facts and events, an event for discourse in the deepest sense of the term; but an event, too, for a mode of rule over those deemed both useful and superfluous. And then there is a set of chapters that pay attention to the discourse of refutation, a kind of apologetics that is produced by black thinkers themselves in the attempt at making sense of this name not at all of their own making, with which they nevertheless have to contend, whether they like it or not''.

"So the argument about the turning of human beings into things or about social death has its limits. Wherever African slaves happened to be settled, no death of social life actually occurred. The work of producing symbols and rituals, language, memory and meaning – and therefore the substance necessary to sustain life – never stopped. Nor did the interminable labor of caring for and repairing that which had been broken, including the infrastructures of survival. Throughout their captivity, African slaves never stopped desiring freedom. This Sisyphus-like effort to resist being turned into waste partly explains why plantation slavery differs from other forms of genocidal colonialism. In fact, inherent to “the human” is something that can never be turned into an object, something ineradicable, and this is the desire to be free''.

"But let me come back to the creative practices of survival you were referring to a moment ago. In the regime of capture that historically characterizes the black experience in America, the capacity to develop multiple modalities of agency and different figures of personhood is crucial. The much-used concept of fugitivity hardly exhausts the repertoires of practices survival actually requires. For once, to get out of the hole and to break through the wall, the captured subject must actively engage in a relation of multiple doubles and multiple selves. He or she must develop an extraordinary capacity to become imperceptible and unassignable, to continually shift from one self to its alternate, to inhabit the tiniest of cracks and fissures.

He or she must know how and when to become like everybody else, how and when to be nobody, when to be alone, when to hide and when to no longer have anything to hide, when to become unfindable and when to rush to the other side in order to meet one’s double. These micro-movements and micro-postures are essential because survival depends on being able to inhabit multiple selves, often at the same time. Agency is therefore not so much a matter of fugitivity, flight or escape as one of knowing when and how to cross over, to become somebody else (self-separation) in the face of what Deleuze and Guattari once called “an overcoding machine”. Obviously, there are risks attached to this dizzy state of endless crossing and becoming whose end is simply to stay alive''.