Achille Mbembe is professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Political Research, University of  the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is also a Visiting Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at the Franklin Humanities Institute, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina. His research is concerned with the social sciences and African history and politics and the emergence of “Afro-cosmopolitan culture,” together with the artistic practices that are associated with it. He has held visiting professorships at the University of California, Berkeley (2001), at  Yale University (2003), at the University of California at Irvine (2004-2005), at Duke University (2006-2011) and at Harvard University (2012). Mbembe has written extensively on contemporary  politics and philosophy, including the seminal and widely translated books Les jeunes et l’ordre politique en Afrique noire (1985), La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun 1920-1960 (1996), Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (1996), De la postcolonie. Essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine (2000),  Sortir de la grande nuit : Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée (2003); Critique de la raison nègre (2013). He is a co-founder of Les Ateliers de la pensée de Dakar.