Thinking Africa with V.Y. Mudimbe
Edited by
– Salim Abdelmadjid, Lecturer in Philosophy, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès.
– Marie-Aude Fouéré Lecturer at EHESS,
– Maëline Le Lay, Researcher at Thalim, and associated researcher at LAM /Sciences Po Bordeaux.
Publication : 2025
Publisher: Twaweza Communications, Kenya | Member of African books collective
Presentation
The philosophical and literary work of V.Y. Mudimbe is one of the most decisive contemporary contributions to thinking Africa. It demonstrates that Africa results from an exogenous, asymmetrical historical construction, of extreme violence, that has constitutively biased the supposedly scientific knowledge about African societies and has therefore required both practical and theoretical reappropriation by Africans. What can be done now to achieve Mudimbe’s aim of thinking and studying Africa against and from outside the epistemic cage of the colonial library?
This collection, the fruit of a collaboration between IFRA-Nairobi and the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Nairobi, is an attempt to think Africa along Mudimbe’s manifold work, ranging from philosophy to literature and the social sciences, carried out in African and Western contexts, in French and English. It features essays by researchers in philosophy, literature and anthropology, as well as a dialogue about Mudimbe’s influence in art, and the translation of an excerpt from his autobiography, Les Corps glorieux des mots et des tres, which exposes the colonial domestication of spaces and minds in his native Congo.
En savoir plus en français : https://apela.hypotheses.org/11819
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NB/ Congolese thinker, philosopher and linguist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe died on 21 April 2025 at the age of 83. He was in the US, where he had lived for many years. […] Find out more
Chapters
- Salim Abdelmadjid, Marie-Aude Fouéré et Maëline Le Lay, « Introduction. Thinking Africa with V.Y. Mudimbe »
- Francis Owakah, « Introducing V.Y. Mudimbe in East Africa : My Experience at the University of Nairobi »
- Kai Kresse, « Africanism and Beyond ? Re-reading Mudimbe in Context Today »
- Alex Wanjala, « Interrogating an African Gnosis in the Analysis of Kenyan Literature »
- Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, « V.Y. Mudimbe’s Modernities : Towards a Temporal and Spatial Excavation of (Neo)colonialism »
- V.Y. Mudimbe, « An Excerpt from Les corps glorieux des mots et des êtres
» (translated by Emelyn Lih) - Interview : « Sammy Baloji : Depicting the Stratified Memory of a Territory Forged by Colonial Policy. A Conversation with Maëline Le Lay through the Prism of the Writings of V.Y. Mudimbe » (French/English)
- Salim Abdelmadjid, « Africa and Dialectics : Reading V.Y. Mudimbe Towards a Concept of Africa »
Official launch of the book at IFRA Nairobi
Wednesday 7 May 2025
