Shortly after the giant bronze statue of Cecil John Rhodes came down at the University of Cape Town, student protestors called for the decolonisation of universities. It was a word hardly heard in South Africa's struggle lexicon and many asked: What exactly is decolonisation? This book brings together some of the most innovative thinking on curriculum theory to address this important question.

In the process, several critical questions are raised:

• Is decolonisation simply a slogan for addressing other pressing concerns on campuses and in society?
• What is the colonial legacy with respect to curricula and can it be undone?
• How is the project of curricula decolonisation similar to or different from the quest for post-colonial knowledge, indigenous knowledge or a critical theory of knowledge?
• What does decolonisation mean in a digital age where relationships between knowledge and power are shifting?

Strong conceptual analyses are combined with case studies of attempts to `do decolonisation' in settings as diverse as South Africa, Uganda, Tanzania and Mauritius. This comparative perspective enables reasonable judgments to be made about the prospects for institutional take-up within the curriculum of century-old universities. Decolonisation in Universities is essential reading for undergraduate teaching, postgraduate research and advanced scholarship in the field of curriculum studies.

In Critique Of Black Reason, eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness - from the Atlantic slave trade to the present - to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations between colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital.

Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion.

With Critique Of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

This book explores the impact of brutalist aesthetics on contemporary capitalism, emphasizing the blurring of natural and artificial realms and advocates Afro-diasporic thought as a solution for societal transformation.

Eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism in his latest book to describe society’s current moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic.

Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a community of humans in solidarity with all living things.

First published in 2001, Achille Mbembe's landmark book, On the postcolony, continues to renew our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. This edition has been updated with a foreword by professor of African literature, Isabel Hofmeyr, and a preface by the author. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests die hard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory. Through his provocation, the `banality of power', Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power in Africa. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity - violence, wonder and laughter - to contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century. On the postcolony, like Frantz Fanon's Black skins, white masks, will remain a text of profound importance in the discourse of anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles.

Johannesburg: The elusive metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa's largest city into urban theory on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa's premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have tended to cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contesting such characterizations, the contributors to this collection reassess classic theories of metropolitan modernity as they explore the experience of 'citiness' and urban life in post-apartheid South Africa. They portray Johannesburg as a polycentric and international city with a hybrid history that continually permeates the present. Turning its back on rigid rationalities of planning and racial separation, Johannesburg has become a place of intermingling and improvisation, a city that is fast developing its own brand of cosmopolitan culture. The volume's essays include and investigation of representation and self-stylisation in the city, and ethnographic examination of frictions zones and practices of social reproduction in inner-city Johannesburg, and a discussion of the economic and litereary relationship between Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique's capital. One contributor considers how Johannesburg's cosmopolitan sociability enabled the anti-colonial projects of Ghandi and Mandela. Journalists, artists, architects, writers and scholars bring contemporary Johannesburg to life in ten short pieces which include reflections on music and megamalls, nightlife, living as foreigners in the city, and built spaces.

Steve Biko, the founder of the Black Consciousness philosophy, was killed in prison on 12 September 1977. Biko was only thirty years old, but his ideas and political activities changed the course of South African history and helped hasten the end of apartheid. The year 2007 saw the thirtieth anniversary of Biko's death. To mark the occasion, the then Minister of Science and Technology, Dr Mosibudi Mangena, commissioned Chris van Wyk to compile an anthology of essays as a tribute to the great South African son. Among the contributors are Minister Mangena himself, ex-President Thabo Mbeki, writer Darryl Accone, journalists Lizeka Mda and Bokwe Mafuna, academics Jonathan Jansen, Mandla Seleoane and Saths Cooper, a friend of Biko's and former president of Azapo. We Write What We Like proudly echoes the title of Biko's seminal work, I Write What I Like. It is a gift to a new generation which enjoys freedom, from one that was there when this freedom was being fought for. And it celebrates the man whose legacy is the freedom to think and say and write what we like.

In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness-from the Atlantic slave trade to the present-to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future.

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its "nocturnal body"---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

Achille Mbembe is one of the most brilliant theorists of postcolonial studies writing today. In "On the Postcolony" he profoundly renews our understanding of power and subjectivity in Africa. In a series of provocative essays, Mbembe contests diehard Africanist and nativist perspectives as well as some of the key assumptions of postcolonial theory.
This thought-provoking and groundbreaking collection of essays--his first book to be published in English--develops and extends debates first ignited by his well-known 1992 article "Provisional Notes on the Postcolony," in which he developed his notion of the "banality of power" in contemporary Africa. Mbembe reinterprets the meanings of death, utopia, and the divine libido as part of the new theoretical perspectives he offers on the constitution of power. He works with the complex registers of bodily subjectivity -- violence, wonder, and laughter -- to profoundly contest categories of oppression and resistance, autonomy and subjection, and state and civil society that marked the social theory of the late twentieth century.
This provocative book will surely attract attention with its signal contribution to the rich interdisciplinary arena of scholarship on colonial and postcolonial discourse, history, anthropology, philosophy, political science, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism.

In Necropolitics Achille Mbembe, a leader in the new wave of francophone critical theory, theorizes the genealogy of the contemporary world, a world plagued by ever-increasing inequality, militarization, enmity, and terror as well as by a resurgence of racist, fascist, and nationalist forces determined to exclude and kill. He outlines how democracy has begun to embrace its dark side---what he calls its "nocturnal body"---which is based on the desires, fears, affects, relations, and violence that drove colonialism. This shift has hollowed out democracy, thereby eroding the very values, rights, and freedoms liberal democracy routinely celebrates. As a result, war has become the sacrament of our times in a conception of sovereignty that operates by annihilating all those considered enemies of the state. Despite his dire diagnosis, Mbembe draws on post-Foucauldian debates on biopolitics, war, and race as well as Fanon's notion of care as a shared vulnerability to explore how new conceptions of the human that transcend humanism might come to pass. These new conceptions would allow us to encounter the Other not as a thing to exclude but as a person with whom to build a more just world.

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, humanity, and planetarity. 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 the world. 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. Out of the Dark Night 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.

This issue of Public Culture attempts to overturn perceptions that frame Africa as an object apart from the rest of the world. By placing the city of Johannesburg-the preeminent metropolis of the African continent and a city facing a complicated legacy of racial strife and wealth accumulation-at the heart of new critical urban theory, Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis broadens discussions of modernity, cosmopolitanism, and urban renewal to include Africa. The issue brings Johannesburg into direct dialogue with other world cities, creating a space for the interrogation and investigation of the metropolis in a properly global sense.Contributors to this issue-a mix of scholars, urban planners, and artists, many of whom hail from South Africa-reveal Johannesburg to be a polycentric and international city that has developed its own cosmopolitan culture. In a detailed study of three streets in the modern precinct of Melrose Arch, one essay shows how the thoroughly commodified and marketed Johannesburg cityscape has shaped the cultural sensitivities, aesthetics, and urban subjectivities of its inhabitants, at times even overriding the historical memory of apartheid. Another essay, focusing on the emergence of a new urban culture, examines how the city itself becomes a crucial site for the remixing and reassembling of racial identities. By tracking the movement of people with AIDS to various locations in the city to seek relief and treatment, another essay reveals an urban geography very different from what is seen from the highways. Finally, through interviews and commentaries, journalists, artists, and architects of Johannesburg offer reflections on the geography and shifting culture of the city and its townships, on the complicated relationship between Johannesburg and other African cities, and on the search for an architectural style that adequately expresses the complexity of this cosmopolitan city. Contributors. Lindsay Bremner, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Grace Khunou, Frederic Le Marcis, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Rodney Place, AbdouMaliq Simone, Michael Watts

Two hypothesis form the basis of this study. First, that development in African countries follows many models, on many time-scales; and secondly that private indirect government is taking the place of the state in controlling individual conduct. The author concludes that a new form of the organisation of power is emerging based on the control of the means of coercion - in effect, privatisation of public violence.

In Critique of Black Reason eminent critic Achille Mbembe offers a capacious genealogy of the category of Blackness—from the Atlantic slave trade to the present—to critically reevaluate history, racism, and the future of humanity. Mbembe teases out the intellectual consequences of the reality that Europe is no longer the world's center of gravity while mapping the relations among colonialism, slavery, and contemporary financial and extractive capital. Tracing the conjunction of Blackness with the biological fiction of race, he theorizes Black reason as the collection of discourses and practices that equated Blackness with the nonhuman in order to uphold forms of oppression. Mbembe powerfully argues that this equation of Blackness with the nonhuman will serve as the template for all new forms of exclusion. With Critique of Black Reason, Mbembe offers nothing less than a map of the world as it has been constituted through colonialism and racial thinking while providing the first glimpses of a more just future. 

In 2005, following the death of two youths of African origin, France erupted in a wave of violent protest. More than 10,000 automobiles were burned or stoned, hundreds of public buildings were vandalized or burned to the ground, and hundreds of people were injured. Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, Peter J. Bloom, and a group of international scholars seek to understand the causes and consequences of these momentous events, while examining how the concept of Frenchness has been reshaped by the African diaspora in France and the colonial legacy.