Description: The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara wrote a monumental history of West Africa in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. Textual Life considers Kamara's story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change.
Review Quotes: Wielding philology as a praxis of love and as revolutionary method, Wendell Marsh takes the reader on an extraordinary textual journey through the life and times of the Senegalese Muslim scholar, Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945). Decisively postdisciplinary and anti-area studies, Textual Life welcomes the reader into Kamara's textual world via Malcolm X's love of study and the long global history of Black liberation philology. It ends in a university classroom in Saint-Louis, Senegal in 2024 with a set of powerful and hope-filled reflections, inspired by the sharp questions of students, on the possibilities for a truly decolonized humanities. Marsh's Textual Life is one of the most original contributions to the humanities that I have encountered in at least a decade. It should be on the reading list of everyone-- not just scholars of Islam or the history of Africa and the Black world--concerned about the present and the future of humanistic inquiry.--Jean Allman, coauthor of Tongnaab: The History of a West African God