On the Postcolony
A Anthropology, History, Nonfiction book. In this respect, to convert is to locate oneself in a particular temporality and duration. This duration is...
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 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...
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- Filetype: PDF
- Pages: 274 pages
- ISBN: 9780520204355 / 0
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More About On the Postcolony
Not that there is no distress. Terrible movements, laws that underpin and organize tragedy and genocide, gods that present themselves in the guise of death and destitution, monsters lying in wait, corpses coming and going on the tide, infernal powers, threats of all sorts, abandonments, events without response, monstrous couplings, blind waves, impossible paths, terrible forces that every day tear human beings, animals, plants, and things from their sphere of life and condemn them to death: all these are present. But what is missing, far from the dead... In this respect, to convert is to locate oneself in a particular temporality and duration. This duration is that of the inexhaustible future constituted by the infinite, the time of eternity, the time that inaugurates divine existence and its extension in the redemption of the body; thus its final point of completionif there is oneis the parousia. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony // How this is possible is, first, by being, literally, several in a single body. We are twelve in my body. We are packed like sardines. In other words, the being that I am exists each time in several modesor, let us say, several beings, which, although sometimes mutually exclusive, are nevertheless inside one another. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony //
A truly novel, insightful conceptualizing of the "postcolony" by an African/French scholar. Some of the essays take after Fanon or Derrida but all take for granted the need to go beyond Hegelian philosophical thought to uncover the true state of modern Africa from within. Challenging and beautifully written even when tackling the subject... As much as I try to buldoze through the verbiage of this book, I couldn't finish it. It took me days and many cups of strong coffee with lots of sweetened condensed milk to go through just three chapters. Caffeine and sugar high, a necessity in wading past theories of postcolonialism.I needed the help of Rita Abrahamsen's persuasion... Amazing. But very complicated to read. It is full of thick academia language. HArd to read but once you get through it, it has so much to say about the effects of colonialism and post colonialism in Africa.
