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.
[7] 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.
[2] Additional influences included post-War French philosophers and writers Bataille, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Blanchot, Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas, Ricoeur, Castoriadis, and de Certeau.
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 chapter deals with many of the same processes as "Of Commandement" - violence, privatization of the public, appropriation of the means of livelihood - but examines how they unfold in a nonlinear manner (an aspect Mbembe calls entanglement).
The majority of the chapter takes the form of an economic analysis of colonial and postcolonial history, examining how the government has become an instrument for transforming public good into private gain.
The phrase "banality of power" refers both to the multiplication and routinization of bureaucratic and arbitrary rules and to elements of the obscene and grotesque (in the terminology of Mikhail Bakhtin) intrinsic in systems of domination.
It explores "the complex interplay of consent and coercion in the postcolony and the carnivalesque disposition of both rulers and ruled in the production and maintenance of hegemonic relations of power and subversion.
Two main issues are considered: first, the burden of the arbitrariness involved in killing what has been already defined as nothingness – an empty figure – and second, the way the negated and disempowered subject takes on the act of their own destruction during death.
The final chapter of On the Postcolony takes a philosophical and theological approach to analysis of the "divine libido" - the emanation of a bio-psychic energy located chiefly in sexuality.
"[1] Mbembe has described this chapter as "an allegoric dialogue with Frantz Fanon... it suggests that in order to exit the Fanonian cul-de-sac — the dead-end of the generalised circulation and exchange of death as the condition for becoming human — it is important to examine in what way, in a context of a life that is so precarious, disposing-of-death-itself could be, in fact, the core of a veritable politics of freedom.
[11] Academics including Ato Quayson, Bruce Janz, Adeleke Adeeko, Judith Butler, Stephen Ellis, Tejumola Olayinan, Jeremy Weate, Rita Barnard, Carola Lentz, Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, and Mikael Karlstrom have published their perspectives on Mbembe's book since it was released in 2001.
[9] The University of Central Florida's Bruce Janz praises Mbembe's rethinking the essentialist, post-structuralist, and "disciplinary" approaches to theorizing Africa and his "hinting at a fourth way, one which does not ignore the strengths of any of the three I have already mentioned, but tries to overcome the… limitations of each.
"[12] However, while praising Mbembe's analysis, Janz notes that "hints of something transformative are hardly developed at all"; the book is excellent description but does not explain what can be done to overcome the challenges it elucidates.
[13] Coquery-Vidrovitch concludes that "[Mbembe's] analysis has the merit of great intellectual coherence, even if one can reproach the author for proposing a model of general development necessarily a little disconnected from the realities and concrete alternatives on the ground.
[14] In other critiques, anthropologists like Carola Lentz object to what they see as Mbembe's "sweeping generalizations,"[15] and philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler further analyzes the sexual politics of power explored in "God's Phallus.
[8] On the Postcolony is one of the most influential modern works on African theory: according to Google Scholar, it has been cited over 8,400 times by other academics (a standard used in the field of citation analysis to assess an article or book's impact).
[18] The works influenced by On the Postcolony span the fields of African studies, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, political science, and critical theory, and include Ferguson's Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order and Puar's Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times.