Mbembe is a great philosopher who has made significant contributions, which are widely cited. This is notable because his work is largely in French and his books have had to be translated into English to reach broader audiences. Despite that delay, as of this writing he has amassed 70,000 citations to his work. This book, On the Postcolony, was one of his earlier ones, published in 2001 by the University of California Press, which was also translated. In this study of colonialism he covers religious, cultural, social, governance issues as they relate to violence and death, which is a topic expanded upon in his later book Necropolitics. A note from this one:

“Banality of power does not simply refer to the way bureaucratic formalities or arbitrary rules, implicit or explicit, have been multiplied, nor am I simply concerned with what has become routine-though certainly “banality” implies the predictability of routine, if only because routine is made up of repeated daily action and gestures. Instead, I refer here to those elements of the obscene and the grotesque that Mikhail Bakhtin claims to have located in “non-official” cultures but that, in fact, are intrinsic to all systems of domination and to the means by which those systems are confirmed or deconstructed.” (p.102)