French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Mbembé, De la postcolonie. Essai sur l'imagination politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine
Philosophy, Anthropology and Ideas
On the Postcolony
Essai sur l'imagination politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine
Achille MBEMBE
Preface by Nadia Yala KISUKIDI
La Découverte
February 2020
ISBN: 9782348057502 — Number of pages: 320
Already a classic in the English-speaking world, this book is a powerful contribution to the critique of tyranny and authoritarianism—those unacknowledged and long-repressed facets of our late modernity.
Achille Mbembe examines how postcolonial social formations—at a time when neoliberal austerity policies deepened their crisis of legitimacy—strove to forge a hybrid, baroque style of rule marked by the predation on bodies, carnivalesque violence, and a symbiotic relationship between the dominant and the dominated. He terms these formations and this ruling style the postcolony.
While anthropology, history, and political science all have their place here, this study is fundamentally aesthetic, as it centers on the stylistics of power. It draws inspiration from novelistic writing and African music from the final quarter of the 20th century. Engaging with artistic creation and the spirits of the dead, this text demonstrates that within spaces seemingly doomed to nothingness and negation lie unsuspected possibilities—the very ones capable of resurrecting language.
Achille Mbembe is one of the most prominent contemporary voices in postcolonial theory and political philosophy. First published at the turn of the millennium, De la postcolonie represents a landmark intervention in African studies, shifting the analytical focus from purely economic or institutional frameworks to the realm of culture and subjectivity. By examining how power is enacted, performed, and resisted in everyday life, Mbembe aligns his work with the critical traditions of Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault, while offering a distinctively African perspective on the complexities of modern sovereignty and state violence.
This book is particularly valuable for researchers and students in the humanities, political science, and cultural studies who wish to understand the symbolic dimensions of authoritarianism. Mbembe’s concept of the postcolony helps readers unpack how regimes use carnivalesque rituals and bodily domination to establish legitimacy, while also showing how citizens co-opt and subvert these aesthetics. By analyzing late twentieth-century African music and literature, the text provides a crucial framework for exploring how creative expression serves as a site of political imagination and linguistic renewal in the face of systemic oppression.