The colonial library and productive futurity in Jean-Pierre Bekolo’s Mudimbe’s Things and Words (2015)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21790505 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Olivier J Tchouaffe (0000-0002-3749-2681, Southwestern University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 61-79 |
| Publication date | 2024-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of African Cinemas (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1754-9221 • E-ISSN: 1754-923X |
| Publisher | Intellect (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1386/jac_00108_1 |
| OpenAlex | W4407700197 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
In Mudimbe’s Things and Words (2015), Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe draw upon notions of colonial cultural politics, the imposed past and the regulatory brutality of the colonial library as integral to the relationship between knowledge and power. In fact, they discuss how knowledge itself is a production of power as Mudimbe deconstructs the work of Michel Foucault. Mudimbe fills the gaps between the ontology and homology, between the invention of Africa and colonial violence as processes harnessed and coded, weaponized and deployed for the exploitation and destruction of the continent. Consequently, notions of the imposed past and the colonial library are not reducible to symbolic questions but demand to be continually confronted. This past continues to live on as a precondition to the mutually enforcing role of colonial logics of power, violence and its legacies in the continent of Africa. This way, this invention of Africa connects the dots between colonial cultural politics, the desacralization of Indigenous African traditional knowledge and practices opening the way for the development and legitimation of a White supremacist materialistic perspective driven by liberal individualism and racial capitalism. Jean-Pierre Bekolo and Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, on the other hand, through their politics of friendship, poke holes to the invention of Africa foregrounding the resilience of an Indigenous objective and an economy of meanings as resources for ordinary Africans to understand themselves better as a collective constantly challenging contemporary politics and aesthetics as in a symbiotic site of Ubuntu’s emancipatory politics through reciprocities, obligations and consequences
Archaeology · Art · Art history · Colonialism · Media studies · Sociology · Anthropology · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Travel Writing and Literature
| Highly cited | No |
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