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Studies on the History of Society and Culture
ما بعد الاستعمار
يكشف مبيمبي في هذا الكتاب عن بعض العواقب البعيدة المدى الناتجة عن التأثيرات النظرية والعملية للعنف والتطرف اللذان يمارسهما المستعمر مع الافارقة من خلال التطرق الى واقع تاريخية صحيحة وقعت للمجتمعات الإفريقية حيث ارتكب المستعمر أفعال تدمير لها خاصية إخفاء معاناة البشر ودفنها في دائرة لا نهائية يقع مركزها في مكان آخر. إضافة الى ذلك. ترتكز السيادة الاستعمارية على ثلاثة ضروب رئيسية: الأول: هو التأسيس المعرفي للعنف من خلال الحق في غزو الآخر واستعماره عن طريق التنظير المعرفي للاختلاف العرقي والتشديد على ثنائية الحر/العبد او الأبيض/ الملون. والثاني: هو إضفاء الشرعية القانونية على العنف بإضفاء دلالات لغوية ونماذج شارحة لتبرير هذا العنف. والثالث: هو التأسيس لبقاء العنف وانتشاره وديمومته من خلال انتاج صور خيالية تأخذ طابعا ثقافيا تاريخيا واجتماعيا. وكل من يخالف هذه الضروب التي تحولت الى بروتوكولات او بديهيات او مسلمات فهو متوحش وخارج عن القانون بل هو حيوان كون الحيوان لا يملك قدرات بل رغبات ودافع إضافة الى افتقاره الى رؤية صحيحة عن العالم.
319 pages
First published January 1, 2001
70 people are currently reading
2621 people want to read
About the author
Achille Mbembe
59 books419 followersJoseph-Achille Mbembe, known as Achille Mbembe (born 1957), is a Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist, and public intellectual.
He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research Foundation.
He has written extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research Foundation.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
January 5, 2011
If it weren't for this site I might go on feeling like I'm the only person who's read this book. I think it's out of print now in the States and really difficult to get ahold of, except through the internet. Mbembe always makes me think of the guy Fanon mentioned in Black Skin, White Masks who was expelled from a French university for being black and having the "impudence to read Engels." Compared to other, much more celebrated contemporary theorists like Critchley or Niall Ferguson, Mbembe's ability to create new concepts is astonishing, because he does this with an extremely thorough review of the existing literature. He always goes for the more difficult, less expected path toward explaining something, using arresting metaphors. This is better seen in the video recordings of his lectures, available on iTunes and Youtube, where everyone in the room is a little shaken by his choice of metaphor and his passion for the argument. For instance, in one Duke video he describes Africa as the "missing dead in the grave" of globalization, or the "Colossus."
In On the Postcolony he argues that academic and popular discourse on Africa is caught within a variety of cliches tied to Western fantasies and fears. For instance, Africa is seen by the West, he argues, as "a headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability…a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete…in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos" (3). Following Fanon, Mbembe holds that this depiction is not simply a reflection of a real Africa but an unconscious projection tied to guilt, disavowal, and the compulsion to repeat. He adds, "Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity" (3). In this sense, like James Ferguson, V.Y. Mudimbe, and others, Mbembe interprets Africa not as a defined, isolated place but as a fraught relation between itself and the rest of the world which plays out simultaneously on political, psychic, semiotic, and sexual levels. [this is an excerpt from his Wikipedia entry which I wrote]
He spent much of his career, for instance in his essay "African Modes of Self-Writing," trying to refute the two main currents of African thought, which he calls nativism and Afro-radicalism. Nativism is a valorizing of original Africanity, a return to one's roots in the sense that Presence Africaine was often criticized for, while Afro-radicalism is an African socialism. He does not believe that these two methods can be useful in opposition to one another any longer. Evidenced by his lifestyle and manner, he is a cosmopolitan through and through, and his work with Sarah Nuttall shows that he's dedicated to the idea of African cities as global cosmopolitan centers.
What is left, then? Well, certainly resistance to both racism and capitalist colonial domination, but at the same time there must be a non-programmatic, fictionalizing turn to the discourse, for Mbembe. We must recognize that even if the world has falsified Africa, Africa has also falsified the world, and that the powers of falsification are one with the truths of fiction, as seen in the writings of Ouologuem and Tutuola.
In On the Postcolony he argues that academic and popular discourse on Africa is caught within a variety of cliches tied to Western fantasies and fears. For instance, Africa is seen by the West, he argues, as "a headless figure threatened with madness and quite innocent of any notion of center, hierarchy, or stability…a vast dark cave where every benchmark and distinction come together in total confusion, and the rifts of a tragic and unhappy human history stand revealed: a mixture of the half-created and the incomplete…in short, a bottomless abyss where everything is noise, yawning gap, and primordial chaos" (3). Following Fanon, Mbembe holds that this depiction is not simply a reflection of a real Africa but an unconscious projection tied to guilt, disavowal, and the compulsion to repeat. He adds, "Africa is the mediation that enables the West to accede to its own subconscious and give a public account of its subjectivity" (3). In this sense, like James Ferguson, V.Y. Mudimbe, and others, Mbembe interprets Africa not as a defined, isolated place but as a fraught relation between itself and the rest of the world which plays out simultaneously on political, psychic, semiotic, and sexual levels. [this is an excerpt from his Wikipedia entry which I wrote]
He spent much of his career, for instance in his essay "African Modes of Self-Writing," trying to refute the two main currents of African thought, which he calls nativism and Afro-radicalism. Nativism is a valorizing of original Africanity, a return to one's roots in the sense that Presence Africaine was often criticized for, while Afro-radicalism is an African socialism. He does not believe that these two methods can be useful in opposition to one another any longer. Evidenced by his lifestyle and manner, he is a cosmopolitan through and through, and his work with Sarah Nuttall shows that he's dedicated to the idea of African cities as global cosmopolitan centers.
What is left, then? Well, certainly resistance to both racism and capitalist colonial domination, but at the same time there must be a non-programmatic, fictionalizing turn to the discourse, for Mbembe. We must recognize that even if the world has falsified Africa, Africa has also falsified the world, and that the powers of falsification are one with the truths of fiction, as seen in the writings of Ouologuem and Tutuola.
September 28, 2013
A very difficult read since it is written in a academic, philosophical style, yet describes the 'Neo Africa' post Colonialism in much detail and how the nepotism, dictatorships and maladministrations function in the African Renaissance.
Prof. Mbembe discusses the three corner stones on which violence is based in take-overs of administration:
1) The founding violence - this is what underpin not only the right of conquest, but all the prerogatives flowing from that right;
2)pre- and post take-over of countries which legitimize the violence;
3) violence is used in the maintenance, spread and permanence of the new government.
Much detail is given in how the new governments operate and protect the interests of the few against the masses. An excellent book on current African politics.
Prof. Mbembe discusses the three corner stones on which violence is based in take-overs of administration:
1) The founding violence - this is what underpin not only the right of conquest, but all the prerogatives flowing from that right;
2)pre- and post take-over of countries which legitimize the violence;
3) violence is used in the maintenance, spread and permanence of the new government.
Much detail is given in how the new governments operate and protect the interests of the few against the masses. An excellent book on current African politics.
November 7, 2025
Achille Mbembe’s notion of the postcolony describes a political and affective condition in which the legacies of colonial power persist through spectacle, excess, and complicity rather than formal domination. Within this framework, his idea of the “aesthetics of vulgarity” captures how authority in the postcolony manifests through obscenity, parody, and transgressive display, a theatre of power sustained as much by its subjects’ participation as by the ruler’s domination. Trump 2.0, anybody?
Trump’s ‘New Golden Age’ is a distinctly American iteration of postcolonial politics turned inward, a grotesque performance of sovereignty in which vulgarity becomes authenticity, domination masquerades as liberation, and the nostalgia for a lost ‘Golden Age’ transforms empire’s decline into populist spectacle. Trump dancing on the stage with the Village People on 19 January 2025 to ‘YMCA’ is still the defining image of his administration’s “aesthetics of vulgarity”.
Mbembe is eminently readable, so it is worthwhile to quote at length from the beginning:
The notion “postcolony” identifies specifically a given historical trajectory—that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves. To be sure, the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic; it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes. It is not, however, just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined self-reflectively. The postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation? But the postcolony is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence? In this sense, the postcolony is a particularly revealing, and rather dramatic, stage on which are played out the wider problems of subjection and its corollary, discipline.
Trump’s ‘New Golden Age’ is a distinctly American iteration of postcolonial politics turned inward, a grotesque performance of sovereignty in which vulgarity becomes authenticity, domination masquerades as liberation, and the nostalgia for a lost ‘Golden Age’ transforms empire’s decline into populist spectacle. Trump dancing on the stage with the Village People on 19 January 2025 to ‘YMCA’ is still the defining image of his administration’s “aesthetics of vulgarity”.
Mbembe is eminently readable, so it is worthwhile to quote at length from the beginning:
The notion “postcolony” identifies specifically a given historical trajectory—that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonization and the violence which the colonial relationship involves. To be sure, the postcolony is chaotically pluralistic; it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or re-forming stereotypes. It is not, however, just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined self-reflectively. The postcolony is characterized by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation? But the postcolony is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence? In this sense, the postcolony is a particularly revealing, and rather dramatic, stage on which are played out the wider problems of subjection and its corollary, discipline.
May 2, 2022
4.5 stars. I'm rather in awe of how well Mbembe is able to convey such complex concepts with such clarity. It's still a difficult read but far more accessible than some others I could name. The fifth chapter, for whatever reason, seemed quite a bit weaker than the others; perhaps it was the copious quotations with little of Mbembe's own elaboration/argument. I was a bit unclear on the purpose of that chapter, though it's entirely possible it just went over my head.
December 15, 2024
I'll be honest, my capacity of reading academic texts have diminished from not picking a book in a while but this was actually kind of hard to out down. Mind blown and I'm not saying this lightly. Mbembe is absolutely brilliant and his texts made me introspect my own world view. Extremely important piece of read especially considering I live in a postcolonial state too.
November 19, 2020
Don't read it all at once unless you're prepared, but it's excellent either way.
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August 17, 2025Brilliant and made my head hurt...definitely needs a more attentive reread
April 20, 2012
Overall, Mbembe's book is invaluable for effectively connecting colonial/post-colonial representations of Africa with brutal exercise of multi-modal power (see Allen, Lost Geographies of Power) in order to gain and maintain control over actual spaces of colonialism (especially Mbembe's primary case study Cameroon). In particular, Mbembe's combination of metaphor and case study offers correctives to cultural studies work (e.g. Derridia and Lyotard) that concentrates unduly on textual deconstruction at the expense of material practice.
The phallic metaphors of control and submission aid in this enterprise, but at the same time are repetitious to the point that by the end they distract from the primary purpose of the book. Nevertheless, one should persist to the end, and then skim back through the book at least once in order to put the pieces together.
I suggest that the book can usefully be broken into three sections. They fall roughly in order within the book, with important exceptions. The first section lays out the mechanics of colonial power, whereby violence joins bureaucracy, spectacle of culture, and other modalities to accomplish and maintain control. The second section applies colonial practices and metaphors to Cameroon, the primary case through which Mbembe articulates his notion of the postcolony. The third section is almost completely metaphorical, dealing with darkly phallic domination of colonial and post-colonial rule.
The phallic metaphors of control and submission aid in this enterprise, but at the same time are repetitious to the point that by the end they distract from the primary purpose of the book. Nevertheless, one should persist to the end, and then skim back through the book at least once in order to put the pieces together.
I suggest that the book can usefully be broken into three sections. They fall roughly in order within the book, with important exceptions. The first section lays out the mechanics of colonial power, whereby violence joins bureaucracy, spectacle of culture, and other modalities to accomplish and maintain control. The second section applies colonial practices and metaphors to Cameroon, the primary case through which Mbembe articulates his notion of the postcolony. The third section is almost completely metaphorical, dealing with darkly phallic domination of colonial and post-colonial rule.
June 30, 2008
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 of violence (sadism) and corruption in the colonial apparatus.
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April 9, 2008I really liked this book and wished that I had a better foundation in...oh, say, politics, history, economics, semiotics...from which to comprehend it. Nonetheless, it was quite thrilling and I would recommend it.
April 27, 2018
A dense book that at times feels indulgent but raises important questions about the continent of Africa and what it means to be an African today in the wake of colonialism. Mbembe looks at the structure of power using examples from his own country, Cameroon and analyzes how the structures influence the people in power and the people subjugated by it. In each chapter he takes pains to reveal the repercussions of history, bringing the reader back to colonial times and then showing what it means for Africa today. All in all, this book will help gain insight into the ontology of the African continent from one of its central theorists and leads to a better understanding of contemporary Africa.
January 21, 2009
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 ("African studies and the postcolonial challenge" African Affairs (2003), 102, 189-201) to accept the necessary evil of convoluted language so that postcolonialist theorists can challenge the power hidden in language.
A summary in one sentence: Mbembe is challenging the bias of European philosoph(ies) that puts and portrays Africa into this particular image we commonly accept.
I am resolved to reread this book and conquer it. (Except for chapter 6 that is simply too ridiculous).
I needed the help of Rita Abrahamsen's persuasion ("African studies and the postcolonial challenge" African Affairs (2003), 102, 189-201) to accept the necessary evil of convoluted language so that postcolonialist theorists can challenge the power hidden in language.
A summary in one sentence: Mbembe is challenging the bias of European philosoph(ies) that puts and portrays Africa into this particular image we commonly accept.
I am resolved to reread this book and conquer it. (Except for chapter 6 that is simply too ridiculous).
May 7, 2022
I will need to reread this in a few years, just like I'll need to reread most pieces of 20th century philosophy several times over my lifetime. I think this was quite a beautiful and poetic work, one that I need to work through more. I should probably finish that talk of Mbembe's on Fanon that I started listening to a while ago.
March 5, 2009
This was one of the best books I have ever read. Challenging, insightful, and still current, I recommend it to everyone.
May 28, 2010
Absolutely amazing theory!!! (on colonization and the postcolony). Learn so much every time I come back to this book!
November 8, 2012
Wow. Just, wow.
February 20, 2016
holy fuck
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December 30, 2023Skimmed this for sociology class-- need to return to it.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews