Abstract

In his latest work, Sortir de la grande nuit, the Cameroonian social theorist Achille Mbembe nuances his description of the ontological status of the postcolonial African subject, which he had theorized extensively in his best-known text, On the Postcolony, and at the same time exploits the conceptual resources of a number of Jean-Luc Nancy's lexical innovations. This recent text is also a reprise of an earlier autobiographical essay, and the gesture of this ‘reinscription’ is critical to our understanding of Mbembe's status as a contemporary ‘postcolonial thinker’, and the way in which he positions himself in relation to a certain intellectual genealogy of postcolonial theory. Within this trajectory, I argue that we can read fruitfully his relationship to three influential figures: Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy and Ruben Um Nyobè.