ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on what remains to date Mbembe's most famous article, 'Provisional Notes on the Postcolony', which was first published in 1992. Mbembe's 'Provisional Notes on the Postcolony', by contrast, is a non-fictional text and belongs to a genre of writing, that of the academic article, which is not spontaneously or primarily identified with the realm of the aesthetic. Mbembe's attempt to go beyond the cliches and stereotypes of previous discourses about Africa consists in large part in elaborating a new form of writing, one that would be capable of transcending the 'limits of epistemological imagination'. The 'Notes' explore the exercise of power in Africa and focus more precisely on the daily relations of subjection and indiscipline that link the state and its subjects. The state's desire to impose its own meanings and representations in the deepest recesses of its subjects' bodies and minds is described by Mbembe through the notion of the fetish.
