Details

Subject(s)

• Kamara, Muusa 1864-1945 [Browse]
• Muslim historians—Senegal—Biography [Browse]
• Muslims, Black—Senegal—Historiography [Browse]
• Senegal—History—To 1960—Historiography [Browse]
• France—Colonies—Africa—Intellectual life [Browse]
• Islam and humanism [Browse]

Series

• Black lives in the diaspora [More in this series]
• Black lives in the diaspora : past / present / future [More in this series]

Summary note

"In the early phase of Africa's colonization, knowing local texts was a way of knowing the colony. This approach to knowledge made sense of the world through a religious and racial hierarchy. Paradoxically, this attitude oriented colonial scholars towards native traditions of learning. Intellectuals from indigenous traditions practiced their own forms of study and had their own textual attitude, which oriented them towards the world through the mediation of meaningful compositions. These two different textual attitudes shared enough of the same orientation to generate a space of encounter, but with the subsequent development of social science, knowing texts became an obsolete way to know the colony. The empirical attitude relegated reading to be one practice alongside the many other practices of the colonizers taking from the colonized. In Textual Attitude, Wendell Marsh narrates the rise and fall of text based knowledge in colonial West Africa through the life and work of Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945), a Muslim scholar, polymath, and one of the most prolific authors of the West African textual tradition. Departing from the critique of orientalism, Marsh argues that the textual attitude is a vitally human orientation toward knowledge whose time has come again, liberated from its former burden of representation. Textual Attitude begins with a close reading of Kamara's Arabic-language autobiography, The Announcement, to sketch a portrait of the main figure of the work and to theorize the textual attitude as an orientation to the world disciplined by philological practice. Then, it considers the French textual attitude which favorably considered African authors such as Kamara and their works insofar as they could generate knowledge instrumental to colonial governance. It then examines the philological encounter that resulted in Kamara's prolific output, including his monumental history of West Africa, Flowers in the Gardens in the History of the Blacks. Next, I show how a shared conversation devolves into disregard with the passage into obsolescence of the textual attitude and the rise of the empirical attitude. Finally, he demonstrates how knowledge and power in the present of texts structured by algorithms favors a previous approach to textualism. The book is based on close readings of Kamara's work, archival research in public and private collections in Senegal, as well as interviews with Kamara's descendants in Senegal and Mauritania"-- Provided by publisher.

Notes

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents

• Overture. Philology as the love of study
• Introduction. Deaths of philology
• Beginnings : the text, the world, and the Sufi
• A degree of prophecy
• Islam noir : surveillance-ethnography and politics of representation
• A monumental text in an orientalist season
• The pitfalls of national literature
• The secular-religious afterlife of Shaykh Musa Kamara.

Show 5 more Contents items

ISBN

• 9780231210706
• 0231210701 (hardcover)
• 9780231210713 (paperback)
• 023121071X (paperback)

LCCN

2024061908

OCLC

1511528708

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