First published in 2001, Achille Mbembe’s landmark book, On the Postcolony, continues to renew our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. This edition has been updated with a foreword by professor of African Literature, Isabel Hofmeyr, and a preface by the author.

In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory. Through his provocation, the ‘banality of power’, 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 in Africa. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity — violence, wonder and laughter — to contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century.

On the Postcolony, like Frantz Fanon’s Black Skins, White Masks, will remain a text of profound importance in the discourse of anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggles.

Wits Press and The Book Lounge present the launch of the first African edition of Achille Mbembe’s ground-breaking book, On the Postcolony.

Mbembe, who is a philosopher and political scientist based at WiSER, will be in conversation with cultural analyst Ashraf Jamal and Ntone Edjabe, founding editor of Chimurenga,

Date: Thursday, 6 August 2015

Time: 5:30 PM for 6:00 PM

Venue: The Book Lounge,
71 Roeland Street
Corner of Buitenkant and Roeland Streets
Cape Town

RSVP: booklounge@gmail.com, 021 462 2425

Book Details

On The Postcolony by Achille Mbembe
Book Homepage
EAN: 9781868146918