Africa Beyond Inventions: Essays in Honour of V.Y. Mudimbe (2024)

By: Zubairu Wai

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Synopsis: 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.