“…His style of writing, however, bears witness to the violence of a personal trajectory marked by monastic 'dressage', the experience of dictatorship, exile and deracination. His 'patient' exegesis of past and contemporary Africa suggests that the 'search for truth' -rather than the 'will to truth' (Brenner 2005: 78) -is, and will remain, a painful process and one of the prime strategies to reconnect with the spirit underlying the 'Declaration of the Rights of Man'.…”
This article demonstrates that the notion of the 'human ' -'man', 'anthropos', 'muntu' (and their sub-human opposites: the pagan, the savage, the 'docile' body) -has played a crucial role in V. Y. Mudimbe's work since the 1960s. Indeed, there is in the author's production a tendency to explore the human sciences and the ways in which they have contributed to the real and imaginary shape, but also obfuscation, of sub-Saharan Africa and its people since the colonial era. From his early writings, Mudimbe, the humanist, the former Benedictine who at the age of 18 was 'completely Francophonized, submitted to Greco-Roman values and Christian norms' (Mudimbe 1991: 94), has conducted a systematic critique of humanism in order to identify the reasons behind Africa's material, political and epistemological dependency on the West, and to envisage routes to its resurrection, a term also used here to reiterate the importance of religion and theology in Mudimbe's trajectory. The first part of the article focuses on The Invention of Africa and examines Mudimbe's adoption of a set of analytical models (previously developed by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les choses) to excavate the discursive orders presiding over the emergence of Black Africans as 'objects' of knowledge. The second part of this study registers Mudimbe's partial dissatisfaction with structuralist anthropology that, although free from former racial prejudices, continues to address other cultures 'allochronically' (Johannes Fabian) and often circumvents the human in the name of scientific objectivity. Finally, the study reflects upon Mudimbe's many attempts -for instance in essays such as Parables and Fables, Les Corps glorieux, Tales of Faith, and Cheminements -to blur the divide between the scholarly essay and the autobiography and to return to his 'own foundation' (Fanon) as an African artist and intellectual.
RésuméCet article démontre que la notion d''humain ' -homme, anthropos, muntu (ansi que leurs équivalents sub-humains: le païen, le sauvage, le corps 'docile') -occupe une place primordiale dans l'oeuvre de V.Y. Mudimbe depuis les années 1960. En effet, Mudimbe s'est souvent penché sur les sciences humaines pour mettre en évidence les facteurs qui ont contribué, depuis l'époque coloniale, à l'apparition, mais aussi à l'effacement, des contours réels et imaginaires de l'Afrique sub-saharienne et de ses habitants. Mudimbe, qui à l'âge de dix-huit ans était 'complètement francophone, pétri de valeurs gréco-romaines et soumis à des normes chrétiennes', a entrepris une analyse critique de la pensée humaniste afin d'expliquer l'emprise matérielle, politique et épistémologique que l'Occident
“…His style of writing, however, bears witness to the violence of a personal trajectory marked by monastic 'dressage', the experience of dictatorship, exile and deracination. His 'patient' exegesis of past and contemporary Africa suggests that the 'search for truth' -rather than the 'will to truth' (Brenner 2005: 78) -is, and will remain, a painful process and one of the prime strategies to reconnect with the spirit underlying the 'Declaration of the Rights of Man'.…”
This article demonstrates that the notion of the 'human ' -'man', 'anthropos', 'muntu' (and their sub-human opposites: the pagan, the savage, the 'docile' body) -has played a crucial role in V. Y. Mudimbe's work since the 1960s. Indeed, there is in the author's production a tendency to explore the human sciences and the ways in which they have contributed to the real and imaginary shape, but also obfuscation, of sub-Saharan Africa and its people since the colonial era. From his early writings, Mudimbe, the humanist, the former Benedictine who at the age of 18 was 'completely Francophonized, submitted to Greco-Roman values and Christian norms' (Mudimbe 1991: 94), has conducted a systematic critique of humanism in order to identify the reasons behind Africa's material, political and epistemological dependency on the West, and to envisage routes to its resurrection, a term also used here to reiterate the importance of religion and theology in Mudimbe's trajectory. The first part of the article focuses on The Invention of Africa and examines Mudimbe's adoption of a set of analytical models (previously developed by Michel Foucault in Les Mots et les choses) to excavate the discursive orders presiding over the emergence of Black Africans as 'objects' of knowledge. The second part of this study registers Mudimbe's partial dissatisfaction with structuralist anthropology that, although free from former racial prejudices, continues to address other cultures 'allochronically' (Johannes Fabian) and often circumvents the human in the name of scientific objectivity. Finally, the study reflects upon Mudimbe's many attempts -for instance in essays such as Parables and Fables, Les Corps glorieux, Tales of Faith, and Cheminements -to blur the divide between the scholarly essay and the autobiography and to return to his 'own foundation' (Fanon) as an African artist and intellectual.
RésuméCet article démontre que la notion d''humain ' -homme, anthropos, muntu (ansi que leurs équivalents sub-humains: le païen, le sauvage, le corps 'docile') -occupe une place primordiale dans l'oeuvre de V.Y. Mudimbe depuis les années 1960. En effet, Mudimbe s'est souvent penché sur les sciences humaines pour mettre en évidence les facteurs qui ont contribué, depuis l'époque coloniale, à l'apparition, mais aussi à l'effacement, des contours réels et imaginaires de l'Afrique sub-saharienne et de ses habitants. Mudimbe, qui à l'âge de dix-huit ans était 'complètement francophone, pétri de valeurs gréco-romaines et soumis à des normes chrétiennes', a entrepris une analyse critique de la pensée humaniste afin d'expliquer l'emprise matérielle, politique et épistémologique que l'Occident
“…On the other hand, he condemns the “will to truth”, a term coined by Foucault to describe one of the powerful determining forces that structure discursive fields. “[A]ny successful will to truth, converted into a dominating knowledge and actualized as an imperialist project (geographically internal or external), might transform itself into a will to “essentialist” prejudices, divisions, and destructions” (Brenner, : 78, citing Mudimbe, ).Very subtly, Mudimbe militates here, that is, in the very act of reading and writing, for what Jean‐Luc Nancy called The Inoperative Community in an eponymous essay first published in French in 1986.…”
Section: Autour De La “Nation”mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Mudimbe, for his part, does not give credit to this opposition between words and acts. For him, literature and philosophy cannot be conceived as separate from the world of actions as reading and writing are given a transformative authority and an essential role in the “search for truth” (Brenner : 78). This idea is one of the most salient arguments of L'Autre Face du royaume where Mudimbe contends that Africans need to think differently, that is, away from Western systems of thought internalized by African scholars, in order to be able to reorganize differently the African polity and city .…”
Section: Autour De La “Nation”mentioning
confidence: 99%
“…Mudimbe has therefore enjoined Africans and Africanists to reject academic certainties and choose “adventure” against “science” (Mudimbe : 57) in order to recapture – he uses the French verb “reprendre” to describe this process (1994: 154–208) – what has been obfuscated by colonialism and its more recent avatars, neo‐colonialism and “Empire”. This search for truth (Brenner : 78) is not, as Nancy argued about the mythical process presiding over the “staging” of the immanent community, driven by a “compulsion” “to return” to the “sources” (Nancy: 46) of one's community. Mudimbe's many attempts to reprendre (reprise, re‐appraise) what has in African religious, artistic, and epistemological manifestations been captured by Western rules, canons, and procedures but also, as indigenization is an inevitable consequence, what has been recaptured, displaced and bricolaged by local imaginations and practices are proof that colonial submission was never absolute; it also points out to the dual meaning of the word invention, which beyond the epistemological fabrication that was examined in The Invention of Africa , is also a process which involves local “actors” and blurs the divides between the “within” and the “without”:The act of inventing is almost always a paradoxical statement.…”
Section: On African Fault Linesmentioning
confidence: 99%
“…On the other hand, he condemns the "will to truth", a term coined by Foucault to describe one of the powerful determining forces that structure discursive fields. "[A]ny successful will to truth, converted into a dominating knowledge and actualized as an imperialist project (geographically internal or external), might transform itself into a will to "essentialist" prejudices, divisions, and destructions" (Brenner, 2005: 78, citing Mudimbe, 1994).…”
This article examines Valentin Yves Mudimbe's work form the early 1970s, in the neo‐colonial era, to the present day, a period marked by the advent of “Empire”, as conceived by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri. The investigation appraises the way in which Mudimbe's epistemological excavation of African discourses and discourses about Africa serves wider ethical and political objectives resonating with critiques of anthropology as formulated by Benoît Verhaegen and Johannes Fabian in the 1960s and 1970s. Part I focuses on Zairian nationalism (“Zairianization”) and the ambition, on the part of the Mobutu regime, to develop an authentic national culture. This examination of the birth of a Zairian “community” is developed through a comparison between Mudimbe's little‐studied Autour de la “nation” (1972) and Kangafu Kutumbagana's Discours sur l'authenticité (1973) and is argued on the basis of a number of propositions formulated by Jean‐Luc Nancy in The Inoperative Community (1991). The second part of the article focuses on Mudimbe's On African Fault Lines (2013); it examines Mudimbe's attempts, in his analyses of contemporary works by Deepa Rajkumar and Geert Hofstede, to reflect on globalization and to assess the political and ethical relevance of critical tools developed in the neo‐colonial period to denounce the unequal basis of anthropology.
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