Achille Mbembe

Cameroon. Professeur d’histoire et de sciences politiques à l’Université de Witvatersrand (Johannesbourg) et directeur de recherche au Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) à Johannesburg. Professor of History and Political Science at the University of Witvatersrand (Johannesburg) and research director at the Witwatersrand Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER), Johannesburg.
By publishing the On the Postcolony, he has emerged as one of the most prolific thinkers in fields within history, sociology and political philosophy, this work has mainly been the subject of heated debate in the Anglo-Saxon universities. The author is led to develop a double critical that the news is obvious: the abstract universalism (that analysis as a nationalization of the universal), but also of some use of postcolonial studies, which in Too much emphasis on differences, moving away from the pursuit of same. He also cites the features that are the strength of the “Western democracies”: the compromise on which is founded the welfare state, the ability to legitimize the social antagonisms through forms of political struggle more or less peaceful and constitution through these same antagonisms of a common world. If these assets today are crumbling, its reflection on the ethics of the next is likely to renew political thinking today.

  • 1985 Les Jeunes et l’ordre politique en Afrique noire, Éditions L’Harmattan, Paris 1985 ISBN 2-85802-542-8
  • 1996 La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun, 1920-1960 : histoire des usages de la raison en colonie.
  • 2000 De La Postcolonie, essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine. (English edition On the Postcolony, 2001. Second revised French edition, 2005.)
  • 2000 Du Gouvernement prive indirect
  • 2010 Sortir de la grande nuit – Essai sur l’Afrique décolonisée
  • 2013 Critique de la raison nègre
  • 2016 Politiques de l’inimitié

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