Achille Mbembe - Collected Works on Decolonization (8 books)

* Achille Mbembe - Collected Works on Decolonization (8 books)

JOSEPH-ACHILLE MBEMBE (b. 1957) is a world-renowned Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist celebrated for his groundbreaking contributions to postcolonial theory, political science, and critical geography. He is best known for pioneering the concept of "necropolitics"—the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how others must die. Operating primarily as a professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research in Johannesburg, South Africa, his prolific writing challenges Eurocentric frameworks and re-imagines the continent of Africa not as a place of lack, but as a vital laboratory of global modernity.

His most well-known work and first book to be published in English, ON THE POSTCOLONY (2000), is a series of provocative essays that contest diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory. Mbembe uses a mix of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary critique to analyze the political imagination, corruption, and the daily rituals of state violence that define life after formal independence. He argues that academic and popular discourse on Africa gets caught within various cliches tied to Western fantasies and fears, and that this depiction is not a reflection of an authentic Africa but an unconscious projection tied to guilt, disavowal, and the compulsion to repeat.

Building upon these themes, Mbembe published CRITIQUE OF BLACK REASON (2013), a sweeping historical and philosophical exploration of how Blackness was systematically constructed by Western capitalism to justify the transatlantic slave trade and colonial subjugation. He argues that the historical logic of racism—once used exclusively to commodify and dehumanize Black bodies—is becoming universalized in the contemporary digital age. Under what he terms the "Becoming-Black of the world," modern neoliberal capitalism now subjects entire global populations to the same precarity, surveillance, and economic exploitation once reserved for the colonized.

His influential work NECROPOLITICS (2016), first introduced as a ground-breaking essay in 2003, updates colonial critique for the twenty-first century, arguing that modern sovereignty is ultimately defined by the power to manufacture "death worlds." Discussing the examples of Africa, and Kosovo, and Palestine ("the most accomplished form of necropower"), he examines how contemporary states utilize borders, warfare, algorithmic surveillance, and systemic exclusion to reduce specific human populations to a state of living death. The book serves as a fierce indictment of how contemporary democracies coexist with, and actively rely upon, topographies of cruelty and human disposable-ness.

Mbembe shifted his focus toward global ecology and human survival with OUT OF THE DARK NIGHT: ESSAYS ON DECOLONIZATION (2018). In this collection, he moves beyond a purely diagnostic critique of power to offer a hopeful, planetary vision for a true decolonization, moving past narrow nationalisms and Eurocentric universalisms to embrace a shared human destiny. He expanded this critique with BRUTALISM (2020) to address how contemporary technological and economic forces treat humanity and the planet as raw materials to be fractured, shaped, and forced into structures of total processing. Together, these later works call for a new "planetary consciousness" that honors the interconnectedness of all living things, charting a path toward global healing and mutual belonging.


The following books are in ePUB and/or PDF format as indicated:

* Brutalism [tr. Corcoran] (Duke, 2024) – PDF
* Critique of Black Reason [tr. Dubois] (Duke, 2017) – ePUB / PDF
* Earthly Community, The: Reflections on the Last Utopia (V2, 2022) – PDF
* Necropolitics [tr. Corcoran] (Duke, 2019) – ePUB / PDF
* On the Postcolony [tr. Berrett et al.] (California, 2001) – ePUB / PDF
* Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonization (Columbia, 2021) – ePUB / PDF

== EDITOR ==

* Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis [with S. Nuttall] (Duke, 2008) – ePUB / PDF
* The Politics of Time: Imagining African Becomings (Polity, 2023) – PDF
* To Write the Africa World [tr. Burk] (Polity, 2023) – PDF


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