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...

In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness--from the Atlantic slave trade to the present--to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses...

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

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.