Achille Mbembe at the CfH 

Within the CfH's theme of  'Social Responsibility of the Artist', Professor Mbembe will be giving a Public Lecture on Necropolitics and a closed Seminar (on invitation only) on the ‘culture wars’ and the role of art in the Netherlands today. This Seminar is organized jointly with the with BAK,basis voor actuele kunst and the Treaty of Utrecht foundation.

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Professor Mbembe was born in Cameroon in 1957 and obtained a PhD in History at the Sorbonne in Paris, France in 1989. Also in Paris, Mbembe obtained a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques. Professor Mbembe is currently a member of the staff at WISER Institute in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a contributing editor of the scholarly journal Public Culture. He is also a visiting faculty member in the department of English at Duke University. His publications include: Les Jeunes et l'ordre politique en Afrique noire (1985), La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (1996), Du Gouvernement prive indirect (2000), On the Postcolony (2001). His most recent publication is entitled: Sortir de la grande nuit. Essai sur l'Afrique decolonisee (Paris, La Decouverte, 2010).

The Social Responsibility of the Artists

The theme of the social responsibility is an initiative of the CfH and Vrede van Utrecht and deals with ways in which cosmopolitan ideas and communities are inscribed and dealt with in literature, visual arts, performance and film. It engages with the emerging notions of world music, visual arts and literature, post-national filmmaking or multicultural writing and invites cultural audiences to reflect on their own responsibilities in a g-local setting. Mbembe is the fourth intellectual to visit us under the theme of the Social Responsibility of the Artist. Previous esteemed guests have been Jordi Savall, Marlene van Niekerk and Noam Chomsky.