Axelle Karera

Axelle Karera is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and African American studies at Wesleyan University. Her areas of specialization are in twentieth century continental philosophy, the critical philosophy of race, contemporary critical theories, and the environmental humanities. Karera received her PhD in Philosophy from the Pennsylvania State University in 2015. In her dissertation, “Retheorizing Fanon through Derrida, Deleuze, and Mbembe,” she showed how many themes in the works of Frantz Fanon had been significantly undertheorized. She thus proposed to probe different philosophical avenues for interpreting his work. As opposed to the traditional reliance on phenomenology and existential philosophy in Fanon studies, she explored new hermeneutical routes by using the political philosophies of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, and Achille Mbembe with the aim of demonstrating how Fanon’s work remains importantly relevant to current practices of combatting issues of war, violence, and racism. She is currently working on her first book project, tentatively titled The Climate of Race: Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics, in which she assesses the ethical and political shortcomings of Anthropocenean discourses on matters of race. Relying primarily on recent philosophical interventions in critical Black studies, she contends that to politicize the Anthropocene will require refusing to lose sight of those for whom the Anthropocene, as a discursive intervention, does not hold any emancipating value.