Textual Life: A Conversation with Wendell Marsh and R.A. Judy

Join us for an engaging conversation about Textual Life with author Drs. Wendell Marsh and R.A. Judy.

Textual Life 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.

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is an Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guérir, Morocco. He researches and teaches at the intersections of African and diasporic intellectual history, comparative literature, religious studies, and the politics of knowledge production.
His scholarship foregrounds African contributions to global intellectual traditions—especially through Arabic-language sources—and examines how race, religion, and language shape the humanities and public discourse.
Beyond academia, he curates public-facing exhibitions exploring the aesthetic dimensions of intellectual life. Most recently he co-curated “Powers of the Unseen” at Express Newark, a multi-artist exhibition that investigated Muslim spiritualities and the politics of representation through contemporary art.

Books will be available for purchase with thanks to, a community space that centers Black art, Black literature, culture, and community.

Info: R. A. Judy is Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh and is a member of the six-person Editorship of boundary 2 an international journal of literature and culture. The journal has published recent special issues critically engaging important topic, including Crisis to Catastrophe: Lineages of the Global New Right, as well as a Dossier: The Tunisian Revolution of Dignity. He is also a member of the Editorial Collective of CriticalProductive, a journal dedicated to the intellectual project of culture, arts and architecture, and on the Advisory Board of liquid blackness, an on-line journal that seeks to carve out a dedicated place for aesthetic theory and the most radical agenda of Black Studies to come together in productive ways; as well as on the Editorial Advisory board of Comparative Literature Studies.

Host or Publisher RU-N Department of Africana Studies