Books by Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world-one plagued by inequality, militarization, enmity, and a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces-and calls for a radical revision of humanism a the means to create a more just society.

Attempts to overturn perceptions that frame Africa as an object apart from the rest of the world

Achille Mbembe is one of the world's most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences. In Out of the Dark Night, he offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment that points toward new liberatory models of community and humanity.

Contains essays that include an investigation of representation and self-stylization in Johannesburg, an ethnographic examination of friction zones and practices of social reproduction in inner-city Johannesburg, and a discussion of the economic and literary relationship between Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique's capital.

Eminent critic Achille Mbembe reevaluates history and racism, offering a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness-from the Atlantic slave trade to the present-to show how the conjoining of the biological fiction of race with definitions of Blackness have been and continue to be used to uphold oppression.

Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness philosophy, was killed in prison on 12 September 1977. Biko was only thirty years old, but his ideas and political activities changed the course of South African history and helped hasten the end of apartheid. The year 2007 saw the thirtieth anniversary of Biko's death. To mark the occasion, the then Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Mosibudi Mangena, commissioned Chris van Wyk to compile an anthology of essays as a tribute to the great South African son. Among the contributors are Minister Mangena himself, ex-President Thabo Mbeki, writer Darryl Accone, journalists Lizeka Mda and Bokwe Mafuna, academics Jonathan Jansen, Mandla Seleoane and Saths Cooper, a friend of Biko's and former president of Azapo. We Write What We Like proudly echoes the title of Biko's seminal work, I Write What I Like. It is a gift to a new generation which enjoys freedom, from one that was there when this freedom was being fought for. And it celebrates the man whose legacy is the freedom to think and say and write what we like.

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 "e;Provisional Notes on the Postcolony,"e; in which he developed his notion of the "e;banality of power"e; 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.