OUT OF THE DARK NIGHT, essays on decolonization

269pp, paperback, First South African Edition, Johannesburg, 2021

First published in French in 2010 as Sortir de la grande nuit. First published in English in the USA in 2021.

"An important, provocative, and powerful intervention into the politics and the production of knowledge after colonialism in France and about the French empire’s former colonies after they became independent" Mamadou Diouf, Columbia University

"Achille Mbembe declares that Frantz Fanon is one of the few who have tackled the philosophical significance of decolonization, not just as a considerable historic moment of transfer of power but above all as a movement of recreation of humanity and a sense of futurity. That was sixty years ago, at the dawn of African independences. We can declare as well today that with this examination of decolonization as the continuing process of coming out of the dark night and as the manifestation of a will to life, which he shows to be currently at work in the experimentations and innovations taking place on the continent. Mbembe has produced one of the very best works in the spirit of Fanon’s thought.” Souleymane Bachir Diagne, author of Open to Reason: Muslim philosophers in conversation with the Western tradition

Achille Mbembe is Research Professor in History and Politics at the Wits Institute for Social and Economy Research, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. He is the author of On the Postcolony (2001), Critique of Black Reason (2017), Necropolitics (2019) and the winner of the 2018 Ernst Bloch Award and the Gerda Henkel Award.