Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities

Textual Life considers Kamara’s story as a parable about the fate of the humanities amid epistemic and technological change.

Wendell H. Marsh argues that Kamara’s scholarship reflected what he calls the textual attitude, an orientation to the world mediated by reading.

Colonial humanists shared this attitude even while upholding racial and religious hierarchies, and they took an interest in African texts and traditions.

The bureaucrats and technocrats who succeeded them, however, disdained such dialogue—for reasons that bear a striking resemblance to the algorithmic antihumanism that is ascendant today.