Mbembe and the Politics of Belonging
Reflections from a Public Lecture at Birkbeck, June 2025
Last Friday, I had the chance to attend a public lecture at Birkbeck, part of the London Critical Theory Summer School. One of the speakers was Achille Mbembe, whose work I’ve admired for years.
I first came across Mbembe during my MA in Literature. I was working on a module that asked us to write about haunting - Derrida-style - in two novels of our choice. I’d chosen A Mercy by Toni Morrison and The Ministry of Painby Dubravka Ugrešić: two novels full of exile, dislocation, and people pushed outside the limits of belonging.
But as I read through the usual theoretical models; European and North American, I felt increasingly uneasy. None of them came close to the kinds of violence or erasure I was encountering in these texts. I didn’t want to rely on the same frameworks that had, in so many ways, contributed to those silences.
Then I found Mbembe’s Necropolitics. And everything changed.
What struck me most was his idea of a ghost that has been so disempowered, it no longer even has the energy to haunt. That stayed with me. I think that’s when I fell in love with his work.
What I love most about critical theory is that it gives me a language to explain the terrible things I’ve seen and experienced. I have lived in war. There are no words for that. But when I encounter work that explores power and sovereignty - who gets to live, who gets to speak, and what structures decide that - it offers a way to speak about the unspeakable.
At the Birkbeck event, Mbembe spoke about belonging - not as something given to us, but as something already there from birth. “If this idea doesn’t have a political sense,” he said, “we must give it one.” Belonging, for him, is the common ground from which a new political imaginary must grow.
He described the world as an “implosive whole,” where all entities are related, whether we recognise it or not, and always incompletely. From that incompleteness, he suggested, we can begin to imagine a different kind of politics: not rooted in identity, but in symbiosis. Not exclusionary, but built around care.
He asked what it might mean to think about world-making not through the lens of identity, but through collectivity, practices of care, and institutional interdependence. “To curate dialogue is to critique,” he said. “We don’t need monologues. We need unity.”
Some of it felt deeply utopian. But it also felt like a continuation of the questions I’ve been exploring in my own work about citizenship, spiritual fellowship, and the power of recognising that we are already part of something shared.
Mbembe gave me the language I didn’t have when I needed it. Hearing him speak, even briefly, was a reminder of why I do this.
During the Q&A, a Palestinian audience member posed a striking question:
“Why speak about historical cases like South African apartheid in your theoretical work, when the genocide in Palestine is happening now?”
It was a moment that brought into sharp relief a set of questions I had already been carrying: Can the historical work I’m doing, focused on mid-Victorian Britain, speak meaningfully to the urgencies of the present? What role does theory play when violence is unfolding in real time? And what does it mean to operate within disciplines that are structurally removed from immediacy, such as history?
After all, history and critical theory are not often aligned. One tends to be rooted in contextualisation and the archive; the other seeks to intervene, to disrupt, to speak to power. I find myself drawn to both. But I’m increasingly aware of the tensions between them and of the ethical questions that arise when studying past structures of exclusion while witnessing present-day injustice.
It has left me with a kind of epistemological unease. Not paralysis, but a need to think carefully and perhaps differently about what scholarship is for, and what it must be accountable to.
