On the Postcolony is a collection of critical essays by Cameroonian philosopher and political theorist Achille Mbembe. The book is Mbembe's most well-known work and explores questions of power and subjectivity in postcolonial Africa. The book is split into an introduction, six essays – "Of Commandement," "Of Private Indirect Government," "The Aesthetics of Vulgarity," "The Thing and Its Doubles," "Out of the World," and "God's Phallus" – and a conclusion. It has been characterized as "one of the most lastingly provocative and stimulating contributions to the theoretical literature on the postcolonial state in sub-Saharan Africa" and is the winner of the 2006 Bill Venter/Altron Award.
On the Postcolony was first published in French in 2000 under the title De la postcolonie: essai sur l'imagination politique dans l'Afrique contemporaine. This edition featured a different organizational structure than the English version and did not include Chapter 4, "The Thing and Its Doubles." The first English edition of the book was published in 2001 by the University of California Press. Two of the chapters included, "The Aesthetics of Vulgarity" and "The Thing and Its Doubles," had been released previously as journal articles in 1992 and 1996, respectively. On the Postcolony was republished in May 2015 by Wits University Press in an African edition. In this edition's preface, Mbembe describes the collection of essays as
Background and theoretical context
On the Postcolony was written in the context of African colonization by European powers (France and the United Kingdom primarily), which began in the late nineteenth century and ended with decolonization after World War II, concentrated in the early 1960s. Political and social ideologies active in this post-colonial era include Pan-Africanism, Negritude, African Socialism and Marxism, capitalism, and anarchism.
In a conversation with the University of the Witwatersrand's Isabel Hofmeyr, Mbembe states that he wrote most of On the Postcolony in the early 1990s as Afro-Marxism was fading in influence, leaving African social theory in need of new paradigms and modes of analysis. Mbembe's twin inspirations were Congolese music, in which he found "the social memory of the present… the drama of African self-realization unfolding" and the Francophone African novel, particularly the work of Sony Labou Tansi, in which "time always appeared as heterogeneous and unpredictable." At this point of crisis in theory, Mbembe saw this music and literature filling the gaps and wrote the essays which became On the Postcolony in the spirit of these works. Additional influences included post-War French philosophers and writers Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas, Ricoeur, Castoriadis, and de Certeau.
Content
While self-contained, each essay contributes a facet to Mbembe's theory of the postcolony and involves a different mode of analysis. These range from the historical, economic, and political (in the initial two chapters) to the literary, fictional, psychoanalytical, philosophical, and theological (in the later four). In Mbembe's view, the overall purpose of his book is to "model the complexities of African life for the Africans" and "theorize time and subjectivity (the consciousness of self and of time) in conditions of a life that is fundamentally contingent and precarious."
Introduction: Time on the Move
In the introduction, translated by A.M. Berrett, Mbembe locates the subsequent essays in the modern context in which, he argues, discourse about Africa – by both Westerners and Africans – has become largely trapped in Western tropes and fantasies in which Africa is rarely "seen as possessing things and attributes properly part of 'human nature'" and when so, these are considered "of lesser value, little importance, and poor quality." In this view, Africa is the "absolute Other" or anti-West, and it is analyzed in terms of lack and void rather than presence: "one of the metaphors through which the West represents the origin of its own norms, develops as self-image, and integrates this image into the set of signifiers asserting what it supposed to be its identity." This has resulted in a distortion of discourse about Africa because the continent is evoked primarily for the purpose of meditation on the West rather than for its own reasons and own purposes. It is this handicapped mode of analysis which Mbembe analyzes and from which he departs in the subsequent essays about the history and present of the postcolonial African subject.