Achille Mbembe and the Critique of Postcolonial Power

Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Otélé, in French Cameroon, and trained as a historian in Paris, completing his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1989 before holding research positions at institutions including the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) in Dakar, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and, since the early 2000s, the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where he remains a research professor. His most influential early book, De la postcolonie, appeared in French in 2000 and was translated into English as On the Postcolony (University of California Press, 2001), a work that reoriented African studies away from treating postcolonial African states as merely failed or incomplete copies of Western models and instead analyzed the postcolony as a distinctive, internally coherent regime of power with its own logic, aesthetics, and modes of subjectivity.