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Join the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) for an online talk in our Islam in Africa - New Books in the Field series. 

THIS TALK IS ONLINE ONLY.  A Zoom link will be shared in January, 2026.

Wendell H. Marsh will discuss his recent book, Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities (Columbia University Press, 2025).

Description:  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.  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.

Dr. Wendell H. Marsh is an Associate Professor of African Literature and Philosophy at Mohammed VI Polytechnic University in Ben Guerir, Morocco. He researches and teaches at the intersections of African and diasporic intellectual history, comparative literature, religious studies, and the politics of knowledge production. Marsh obtained his PhD from Columbia University in 2018 in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies and Comparative Literature.