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

Sep 22, 2025

Wendell H. Marsh, an Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy, dives into his groundbreaking book about the interplay of Islam and Africa in shaping the humanities. He highlights the remarkable story of Shaykh Musa Kamara, whose ambitious work went unpublished due to colonial neglect. Wendell discusses the 'textual attitude'—a lens through which to view knowledge—and argues for the importance of humanities in today's algorithm-driven world. He also shares insights from his teaching experiences and future endeavors in promoting a more inclusive academic dialogue.

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ANECDOTE

Childhood Translation Sparked a Career

Wendell Marsh recounts a childhood speech impediment that made his sister act as his translator and spurred his love of language.
That early experience led him to intensive study, shaping his path toward languages and Pan-African solidarity.

ANECDOTE

Kamara’s Manuscript And Its Long Wait

Marsh recounts Sheikh Moussa Kamara as a prolific Arabo-Islamic writer whose History of the Blacks sought French publication but was sidelined.
He shows Kamara's later revival across decades and contexts, making Kamara a parable for the humanities' changing fortunes.

INSIGHT

Historical Texts Regain Relevance In Crisis

Kamara’s critiques of jihad and his quietist references gained renewed interest after regional insurgencies.
Historical writings can resurface with new political salience depending on contemporary crises.

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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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