Africa Beyond Inventions: Essays in Honour of V.Y. Mudimbe

Africa Beyond Inventions is a rich critical engagement with the work of V.Y. Mudimbe. For decades, Mudimbe advanced a distinctive and erudite critical project that contributes to various bodies of knowledge in fields such as philosophy, anthropology, theology, postcolonial studies, decolonial theory, literary criticism, cultural studies, prose fiction, and African studies more broadly. A decade after his retirement and in the expansive spirit of his work, this volume stages a productive engagement with Mudimbe’s remarkable and capacious body of work and the conceptual, epistemic, methodological, and ethical challenges it poses for the modern disciplines, specifically in relation to Africa. It situates Mudimbe in his proper place as a complex and significant thinker whose extraordinary contributions to various bodies of knowledge deserves to be recognised and better apprehended for what it has taught and continues to teach about the discursivity of the modern disciplines and the possibility of decolonising their colonising imprints in a moment that has been characterised as a decolonial turn. Through these engagements, the volume honours the intellectual legacy of one of Africa’s most brilliant minds and make his work accessible to a new generation of readers. Foreword Likasi : The Past in the Present Beyond The Invention of Africa Why Did You Leave the Monastery Then? Conclusion References Preface Contents Notes on Contributors Part I Overture 1 Resurrecting Mudimbe Prologue: A Conference and Its Evocations Portrait of a Master Invention, Gnosis, and the Colonial Library Decolonisation and Its Limits In the Footsteps of a Master Mudimbe’s Response References Part II Discourse Of Otherness 2 Mudimbe’s Homo Absconditus: Towards a Resurrection of the Human Introduction An Excavation of Africanism Writing the Human Notes References 3 Aesthetic Theologies of Resemblance, the Production of Colonial Difference, and Possibilities of Ethical Translation Resemblances, Temporality, and Non-Secular Medieval Latin-Christian Theocentric Sociogeny The Colonial Library: Towards the Production of Difference The (Mis)Translation of Concrete Local Realities and the Invention of ‘African Art’ Allochronic Discourse, the Ethical-Political, and Marginality as Method Coda Notes References 4 Notions of Africanity Introduction Pre-Greek and Greco-Roman Paradigms Modern Metaphors Mudimbe’s Intellectual Project References Part III Reading The Postcolonial 5 Refusing to Vanish: Despair, Contingency, and the African Political Introduction Histories Black Marxisms Conjugating Contingency Notes References 6 Decolonizing Knowledge in Africa: Mudimbe’s Philosophical Deconstruction of the Postcolonial Event Mudimbe and the Philosophies of Deconstruction The Philosophy of the Postcolonial Event The Postcolonial Event: A Phenomenology of the Encounter The Postcolonial Event and the Truth Procedure Constructing the Colonial, the Decolonial and the Postcolonial Archaeology of Ethnology and Anthropology The Challenge of Christian Faith in Africa On the Deconstruction-Reconstruction of Knowledge in Africa The Dialectic of a ‘Positive’ Otherness Writing and Thinking Differently About or on Africa The ‘Heretical’ Writing of Philosophical Activity in Africa Concluding Remarks Notes References 7 Recreating Knowledge About Africa in the Shadow of the Colonial Library Introduction The Colonial Library The Intransigence of the Colonial Library—Mudimbe’s Discussion of E.W. Blyden Moving Forward Creatively and Subversively Appropriating the Colonial Library An Illustration: Souleymane Bachir Diagne and the Search for Africa Some Qualifications and a Conclusion References 8 The Dance of Plato and V.Y. Mudimbe, or the Relationship Between Plato’s Epistemology and Mudimbe’s Phenomenology Introduction Plato’s Epistemology in The Euthyphro and The Theaetetus V. Y. Mudimbe in Shaba Deux and L’Ecart (The Rift) The Phenomenology of the Congolese Intellectual in L’Ecart Conclusion Notes References Part IV Sites Of Inscriptions 9 The Elusive Mudimbe: A Feminist Journey Through His Novels Introduction Mudimbe’s Discourse on Colonization and African Traditional Order The Reformative of the Indigenous Mind and African Tradition The Reformative of the Indigenous Mind and the Coloniality of Gender The Reformative of the Indigenous Mind and African Identity Women’s Voices in Mudimbe’s Novels Mudimbe’s Literary Feminism Mudimbe’s Novels and the Question of Sexuality From Bisexuality to Contestation of Heteronormativity Bisexuality and Gender Performance in BI Conclusion Notes References 10 Religion and Theology as Cultural and Political Performance Introduction The Concept of Religion Religion as Political Performance Theology as Cultural Discourse Theology and African Messianism as Political Performance Deus Africanus and Deus Christianorum: Ambiguity or Equivocation? Notes References 11 Securitisation and the ‘Weak States’ Concept: A Mudimbean Analysis Introduction A Mudimbean Analysis of the ‘Weak States’ Discourse The Emergence of the ‘Weak States’ Concept Lessons from Mudimbe: Securitisation and Beyond Conclusion References Part V Finale 12 Afterword: Letter to VY Mudimbe: On the Euromorphic Practice of Critique Que Faire? Regarding Fieldwork Anxieties of the Same Of Inscriptions in Disciplinary Spaces Of the Euromorphic Practice of Critique On the Instrumental Value of Critique Coda References Appendix: V.Y. Mudimbe: A Bibliography Index