"The English edition of this book does not exactly correspond to what was published in French as Sortir de la grande nuit in 2010, and different passages date from different times of writing and have different translators. Daniela Ginsburg translated the material that came from Sortir de la grande nuit. Portions of this new material is based on work featured in my essay "Future knowledges and their implications for the decolonizing project" in the book Decolonisation in universities: the politics of knowledge edited by Jonathan Jansen and published by Wits University Press in 2019"--page viii. Translated from the French. Includes bibliographical references.
Contents:
Introduction -- Planetary entanglement -- Disenclosure -- Proximity without reciprocity -- The long French imperial winter -- The house without keys -- Afropolitanism -- Epilogue: the politics of the future world.
Summary:
"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 and humanity. 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 Africa. 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, making the case for South Africa as its laboratory. Out of the Great Darkness 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"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.