This accessible guide:
- Considers examples from African literature in Arabic, English, French, and Yoruba, and shows the relevance of Mbembe’s thought beyond Anglophone writing;
- Explores how Mbembe’s work relates to contemporary global events, and charts Mbembe’s intellectual development between Cameroon, France, and the U.S.A.;
- Discusses core concepts from across Mbembe’s career, including the positioning of Africa within Western and Afrodiasporic thought, the colony, postcolony, necropolitics, decolonization, Afropolitanism, technology, and the environment;
- Reveals Mbembe’s engagement with key global events including the #RhodesMustFall and #BlackLivesMatter movements, and the call for the restitution of African objects in Western museums.
Offering a clear and accessible route into what can be a complex area, this book shows the significance of Mbembe’s thought across literature, history, postcolonial studies, gender studies and critical theory.
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgements
Why Mbembe?
Key ideas
1. Race, Africa, and Questions of Knowledge
2. The Colony
3. The Postcolony
4. The Nocturnal Sphere and Necropolitics
5. Out of the Dark Night: Decolonization and the New Human
6. Afropolitanism
7. Technology
8. The Planetary and the Common
After Mbembe
Further Reading
Works Cited
Index
Biography
Oliver Coates is Director of Studies in History and Politics at St. Edmund’s College, University of Cambridge, UK and Associate Researcher of the Institut des mondes africaines, C.N.R.S., Paris. His recent research has been published in International Journal of African Historical Studies, Journal of Asian and African Studies, and Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History.
