Product Description

Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of post colonial 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 post colonial 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 post colonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #49371 in Books
• Published on: 2001-06-13
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 292 pages

Customer Reviews

A Difficult yet Informative Study
Despite its difficulty, Achille Mbembe's careful study illuminates many aspects of 'postcoloniality', especially in regards to Africa. While many postcolonial theorists have focused almost exclusively on South Asia and Britain, basing their work on such diasphoric writers as Salman Rushdie and Michael Ondaatje, Mbembe takes a different stance, using philosophers such as Foucault to show the repercussions of the colonial endeavour. He then applies the traces of colonialism onto the emergent and now pseudo-independent postcolonial states, showing how power is exercised through the control of both the individual and collective body. Mbembe creates a theory of violence that applies to many newly emergent states around the world, illuminating how populations are controlled and abused by those who are supposed to be leading them.

While writing this review, I end up falling into many of the pitfalls of postcolonial theory: long sentences, archaic terminology, etc. I assure you that Mbembe, despite the inevitable difficulties brought by the subject matter, is much easier to read than other theorists such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak. Additionally, his differing approach--unlike Spivak and Bhabha, he does not devote himself to deconstruction--is a breath of fresh air for those of us who look for readable, informative theory. As noted above, his focus on Africa is also greatly refreshing.

More postmodern nonsense
For “lovers” of hollow, post-modern clap-trap1, this is yet another fine “example” [I've punctuated this in the pointless style of the work itself, although Amazon doesn't allow italics, so the complete pretentiousness of the punctuation of the original cannot be shown in its full glory]. A sample: “More than any other region, Africa thus stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of “absence,” “lack,” and “non-being” of identity and difference, of negativeness—in short, of “nothingness.”13 And, contrary to M. de Certeau’s view, the problem is not that Western thought posits the self (self-identity) as other than the other.14...’ And so on, endlessly and meaninglessly.

I’m from the West, and I am not obsessed with nothingness, nor do I engage in circular discourses about it, or anything else (unless I’ve been drinking heavily, of course, which the M. Mbembe may well also have been while writing this nonsense). Indeed, I am so unobsessed with it that, finding this book to be full of it (great postmodern paradox: full of nothingness!243) my other than the other could not bear to read much more than the first few boring, convoluted pages. I posit that any potential readers do not spend money on it. I have certainly de-posited it in a receptacle—a waste receptacle.