Achille Mbembe is one of the world's
most profound critics of colonialism and its consequences, a major
figure in the emergence of a new wave of French critical theory. His
writings examine the complexities of decolonization for African
subjectivities and the possibilities emerging in its wake. In Out
of the Dark Night, he
offers a rich analysis of the paradoxes of the postcolonial moment
that points toward new liberatory models of community, humanity, and
planetarity.
In
a nuanced consideration of the African experience, Mbembe makes
sweeping interventions into debates about citizenship, identity,
democracy, and modernity. He eruditely ranges across European and
African thought to provide a powerful assessment of common ways of
writing and thinking about the world. Mbembe criticizes the blinders
of European intellectuals, analyzing France's failure to heed
postcolonial critiques of ongoing exclusions masked by pretenses of
universalism. He develops a new reading of African modernity that
further develops the notion of Afropolitanism, a novel way of being
in the world that has arisen in decolonized Africa in the midst of
both destruction and the birth of new societies. Out
of the Dark Night
reconstructs critical theory's historical and philosophical framework
for understanding colonial and postcolonial events and expands our
sense of the futures made possible by decolonization.