Wendell Marsh, "Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities" (Columbia UP, 2025)

Sep 22, 2025

In this enlightening discussion, Wendell H. Marsh, Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy, explores the pivotal contributions of Senegalese scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara. He delves into Kamara's monumental work, History of the Blacks, challenging colonial narratives on African history. Marsh emphasizes the 'textual attitude,' revealing how humanities can mediate understanding in our rapidly changing world. He also shares insights on Islamic reform movements during French colonialism and his future projects that build on Kamara's legacy.

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ANECDOTE

How Speech Therapy Shaped A Scholar

Wendell Marsh recounts childhood speech therapy and his sister translating for him, which sparked his love of language and study.
That early struggle shaped his commitment to translation, Pan-African language study, and ultimately work on Senegalese Islam.

INSIGHT

Kamara As Parable For The Humanities

Sheikh Moussa Kamara authored a monumental Arabic history of West Africa that was initially engaged by colonial scholars but later neglected.
Marsh uses Kamara's publication struggle as a parable for the humanities' changing status amid political and technological shifts.

INSIGHT

Triangulating Futatoro's Historical Forces

Futatoro's 19th-century history was shaped by competing Muslim actors and French colonial officials with divergent aims.
Marsh traces Boulogne Mogdadsek, Hajj Umar, and Louis Faidherbe to map Islam's complex role under colonialism.

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Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025), is a groundbreaking book that recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation. It makes a case for a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.

The Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945) wrote History of the Blacks, a monumental history of West Africa, in a time when colonial discourses asserted that Africans lacked both writing and history. He sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition of the book by working with humanists in colonial institutions, but the project was ultimately undermined by the disregard of the French state.

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.

Drawing on Kamara’s body of work, colonial archival documents, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal, Textual Life offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. By engaging with African and Muslim intellectual resources, Marsh shows how thinkers like Kamara who were subjected to colonialism can help us find a future after empire.

Wendell Marsh is Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University.

Madina Thiam is Fannie Gaston-Johansson Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

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