Achille Mbembe

Achille Mbembe is a Cameroonian philosopher, political theorist and historian who earned his doctorate at the Sorbonne and is a research professor at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. On the Postcolony examines how power works in African states after colonialism, through display, excess and the everyday complicity of rulers and ruled. His idea of necropolitics, the power to decide who may live and who must die, has been widely used to understand violence, borders and race in the modern world.

Key ideas

• Postcolonial power works through spectacle, excess and the grotesque as much as through force.
• Rulers and ruled in the postcolony share a common world of signs, which binds them together even in resistance.
• Necropolitics is sovereign power expressed as the right to decide who may live and who must die.
• Colonies, plantations and occupied zones show how modern states suspend law for some populations.
• Modern ideas of race turned Black people into a category of exploitable bodies, a history he calls Black reason.

Major works

• On the Postcolony (2000)
• Critique of Black Reason (2013)
• Necropolitics (2016)

In the Book corner

• On the Postcolony 2000 (English 2001) · Advanced
  A book of linked essays by a Cameroonian political philosopher, first published in French with the subtitle Essai sur l'imagination politique dans…

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