Mbembe, a critic of colonial rule and its aftermath and a leading voice in a recent wave of French critical theory, gathers essays on what decolonization has meant for African ways of being in the world. The collection dwells on the contradictions of the postcolonial present and looks for models of community and shared humanity that might come out of them.

Working across European and African intellectual traditions, Mbembe intervenes in arguments over citizenship, identity, democracy, and modernity, and takes the measure of conventional habits of writing and thinking about the continent. He faults European thinkers, French ones especially, for ignoring postcolonial critiques that expose how appeals to universal principle keep certain people out.

The book also advances a reading of African modernity built around Afropolitanism, a way of inhabiting the world that emerged from decolonized Africa amid both ruin and the founding of new societies, with South Africa treated as its testing ground.