Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Multidirectional Memory’
- 1 ‘Mission Impossible?’
- 2 ‘The Invention of Otherness’
- 3 ‘The West or the Rest?’
- 4 ‘Changing Places’
- 5 ‘Independences?’
- Conclusion: ‘The Return of the Unhomely Scholar’
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Conclusion: ‘The Return of the Unhomely Scholar’
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction: ‘Multidirectional Memory’
- 1 ‘Mission Impossible?’
- 2 ‘The Invention of Otherness’
- 3 ‘The West or the Rest?’
- 4 ‘Changing Places’
- 5 ‘Independences?’
- Conclusion: ‘The Return of the Unhomely Scholar’
- Notes
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘Reading Mudimbe’, argues Kai Kresse, ‘means engaging in an intellectual space where African studies just cannot happen in splendid isolation from other disciplines, in disjunction from the European history of the study of humanities’. Indeed, V. Y. Mudimbe conjures up the image of a fabulously inquisitive reader sifting and collating data across disciplines. The adverb ‘fabulously’ is used here to reiterate the author's belief that essays and exegeses are also fables, that is, attempts to translate what can, at best, only be transformed. His presence at the intersection of several ‘libraries’ bears witness to his ambition to read Africa as an insider but also as an outsider, thereby rejecting simplistic racial, ideological, but also theoretical affiliations. In Les Corps glorieux, he remarks in this respect that the motto Etiam omnes, Ego Non [I shall do and think it even though everybody does otherwise] (CG, 20) has helped him from an early age onwards to value personal freedom above everything else, a stance which resonates with Fanon's ‘Je suis mon propre fondement’ in Peau noire, masques blancs. This posture has two immediate consequences. First, Mudimbe can sometimes appear as the devil's advocate who would, for instance, celebrate Lévi-Strauss's and Foucault's interventions but also, at other moments, dismiss their writings as fables about fables and denigrate the over-generalising propensity of their claims. This critical stance has also enabled him to re-open ambiguous ‘texts’ such as Bantu Philosophy, Une Bible noire, and Pierre Romain-Desfossé's tutelage of Katangese artists and read them as an epistemologist, that is, away from a certain form of political correctness which would tend to measure the past, and past critical positions, with instruments developed in the present. Mudimbe is an avid reader and a prolific writer and the critical brand of erudition that he has developed over the years, in fact since the beginning of his career, has been a vehicle to demonstrate that Africanism, an amorphous field that nonetheless gained scientific legitimacy and contours towards the end of the colonial rule, has always been coloured by racial assumptions. He has therefore contended that statements and texts about sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial period were defined and shaped by the conditions of possibility of their production.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- V. Y. MudimbeUndisciplined Africanism, pp. 182 - 189Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013