Thinking Africa with V.Y. Mudimbe

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.