Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Black Lives in the Diaspora: Past / Present / Future)

Textual Life is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation.It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa. The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history.He sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition of the book by working with humanists in colonial institutions, but the project was ultimately undermined by the disregard of the French state. Textual Life considers Kamara’s story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change.Wendell H. Marsh argues that Kamara’s scholarship reflected what he calls the textual attitude, an orientation to the world mediated by reading.Colonial humanists shared this attitude even while upholding racial and religious hierarchies,