By Achille Mbembe from WitsPress:
First published in 2001, Mbembe’s landmark book 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...[more]
