Devenir-nègre du monde
Diagnosis forged by Achille Mbembe: under neoliberal capitalism, the condition once reserved for slaves of African origin—to be turned into a thing, a commodity, an interchangeable body, stripped of all power over one’s future—ceases to be confined to a single group and spreads to humanity as a whole. The *Nègre* thus becomes the name for a generalized condition: that of a human rendered fungible, soluble, exploitable at capital’s whim. Mbembe calls this movement the *becoming-Nègre* of the world. It is neither a racial category nor a mere metaphor, but the analysis of an economic logic that universalizes an experience first lived by the enslaved.
C'est cette fongibilité nouvelle, cette solubilité, son institutionnalisation en tant que nouvelle norme d'existence et sa généralisation à l'ensemble de la planète que nous appelons le devenir-nègre du monde.
The term turns history against the present. As Mbembe reminds us, the “Negro” is an invention—not a fact of nature but a figure produced by early capitalism, that of the slave trade and the plantation, which turned men into commodities and stripped them of the future and time, “those two matrices of the possible.” The word does not refer to a skin color but to an operation—one that reduces a living being to an available thing. And it is this operation, Mbembe argues, that neoliberalism has revived on a planetary scale.
The novelty lies in a single word: fungibility. A fungible commodity is interchangeable, measurable, dissolvable into calculation. Late capitalism now treats humans—all humans, not just those marked by race—as digital data, codes, replaceable units of labor. The nègre condition, long confined to a group and a continent, becomes the “new norm of existence.” This is why Mbembe speaks of a becoming: not a fixed state but an ongoing process, advancing as the market’s grip on lives tightens.
The move aligns with—and radicalizes—Marx’s commodity fetishism, where relations between people take the form of relations between things, and intersects with the diagnosis of a subject compelled to self-exploit, as described in Byung-Chul Han’s society of fatigue. But Mbembe adds the memory of slavery: he does not merely say that capital reifies; he says that the form of this reification has a name, and that name comes from the holds of the slave ship. Against this diagnosis, Sarr’s Afrotopia offers the other side: not the endured condition, but the power to invent a world where it ends.
The world’s becoming-nègre ≠ a racial or biological category: Mbembe instead makes it the name of an economic condition detached from color. ≠ a mere rhetorical image: it is a diagnosis of capitalism, describing a real logic of human interchangeability. ≠ a closed fate: naming the process is already the first step toward resisting it.