[5] Mbembe has written extensively on African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris: Karthala, 1996).

Although he is called a postcolonial theorist, namely due to the title of his first English book, he has thoroughly rejected this label more recently,[11] because he sees his project as one of both acceptance and transcendence of difference, rather than of return to an original, marginal, non-metropolitan homeland.

[18] Following Frantz Fanon and Sigmund Freud, Mbembe holds that this depiction is not a reflection of an authentic Africa but an unconscious projection tied to guilt, disavowal, and the compulsion to repeat.

Mudimbe, and others, Mbembe interprets Africa not as a defined, isolated place but as a fraught relationship between itself and the rest of the world which plays out simultaneously on political, psychic, semiotic, and sexual levels.

Mbembe claims that Michel Foucault's concept of biopower – as an assemblage of disciplinary power and biopolitics – is no longer sufficient to explain these contemporary forms of subjugation.

To the insights of Foucault regarding the notions of sovereign power and biopower, Mbembe adds the concept of necropolitics, which goes beyond merely "inscribing bodies within disciplinary apparatuses".

[21] In early 2020, the Federal Commissioner for Jewish Life and the fight against antisemitism, Felix Klein, called for the cancellation of a keynote address by Mbembe scheduled to be delivered on 14 August that summer at the Ruhrtriennale.

[22][21] The false evidence for this charge was based on comments Mbembe made in two books where he drew parallels between the separatist policies deployed in the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and South Africa under Apartheid.

[27][28] In 2010 and 2015, he signed petitions endorsing the academic boycott of Israel[29][30] Mbembe is married to Sarah Nuttall, who is professor of literary and cultural studies and director of the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2022, ISBN 3-86331-677-0 'Genealogical Misfortunes': Achille Mbembe's (Re-)Writing of Postcolonial Africa', Michael Syrotinski, Paragraph, 35 (3).