On the Postcolony

Achille Mbembe

Published by University of California Press 2001

On the Postcolony

Achille Mbembe

Volume 41 in the series Studies on the History of Society and Culture

https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520917538

Overview
Contents

About this book

Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of postcolonial studies writing today. In On the Postcolony he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory.

This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays—his first book to be published in English—develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony," in which he developed his notion of the "banality of power" in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity — violence, wonder, and laughter — to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century.

This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and postcolonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

Author / Editor information

Mbembe Achille :

Achille Mbembe lives in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the author of three books published in French, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun(1920-1960): Histoire des usages de la raison en colonie (1996).

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: Time on the Move Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Of Commandement Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	24
2. On Private Indirect Government Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	66
3. The Aesthetics of Vulgarity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	102
4. The Thing and Its Doubles Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	142
5. Out of the World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
6. God's Phallus Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	212
Conclusion: The Final Manner Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	245
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271