Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities

Textual Life rethinks the role of knowledge in colonial and postcolonial nation-making and offers a new approach to the study of Islam in Africa. At its center is Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945), whose History of the Blacks challenged colonial claims that Africans lacked writing and history. His effort to publish the work with colonial humanists was ultimately thwarted by a transformation in knowledge production.

Wendell H. Marsh reads Kamara's story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid political, epistemic, and technological change. Drawing on Kamara's body of work, colonial archival documents, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal, Textual Life offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. By engaging with African and Muslim intellectual resources, Marsh shows how thinkers like Kamara who were subjected to colonialism can help us find a future after empire.