Theory has been the name of the West's attempt at domesticating contingency as well as the way the West has distinguished itself from the Rest. As the new century unfolds, it is increasingly acknowledged that there is no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination, or to pose new questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded upon. A site of unfolding developments that are contradictory, uneven, contested, and for the most part undocumented, the Continent is perhaps the epicentre of contemporary global transformations.
In this...Read more
Theory has been the name of the West's attempt at domesticating contingency as well as the way the West has distinguished itself from the Rest. As the new century unfolds, it is increasingly acknowledged that there is no better laboratory than Africa to gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination, or to pose new questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded upon. A site of unfolding developments that are contradictory, uneven, contested, and for the most part undocumented, the Continent is perhaps the epicentre of contemporary global transformations.
In this new book, which has the hallmarks of his other works, Achille Mbembe describes a deeply heterogeneous world of flows, fractures and frictions. Power relations and the antagonisms that shape late capitalism are being redefined in ways and forms not seen at earlier historical periods. New boundaries emerge while old ones are being redrawn. The paradoxes of mobility and closure, of connection and separation, of continuities and discontinuities between the inside and the outside, the local and the global, or of temporariness and permanence, pose new challenges to critical thought. Furthermore, they testify to an openness of the social that can no longer be solely accounted for by earlier descriptive and interpretive models. In the process, Mbembe shows how any inquiry into the place of Africa in theory is of necessity an interrogation concerning the experience of the world in the epoch of planetary power.
In this new book, which has the hallmarks of his other works, Achille Mbembe describes a deeply heterogeneous world of flows, fractures and frictions. Power relations and the antagonisms that shape late capitalism are being redefined in ways and forms not seen at earlier historical periods. New boundaries emerge while old ones are being redrawn. The paradoxes of mobility and closure, of connection and separation, of continuities and discontinuities between the inside and the outside, the local and the global, or of temporariness and permanence, pose new challenges to critical thought. Furthermore, they testify to an openness of the social that can no longer be solely accounted for by earlier descriptive and interpretive models. In the process, Mbembe shows how any inquiry into the place of Africa in theory is of necessity an interrogation concerning the experience of the world in the epoch of planetary power.
- ISBN13 9781868145461
- Publish Date 28 February 2015
- Publish Status Transferred
- Publish Country ZA
- Imprint Wits University Press
- Format Paperback
- Pages 304
- Language English