On the Postcolony : 41

This 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.