Mudimbe's Fetish of the West and Epistemological Utopianism

This article will provide a close reading of Mudimbe's early collections of essays L'Autre Face du royaume (1973) and L'Odeur du père (1982). In the English-language exegesis of Mudimbe's writings, these two key texts have been unduly neglected in favour of The Invention of Africa (1988), an essay which, from a chronological point of view, coincided more conveniently with the advent of the postcolonial ‘turn’. I will however contend that these two collections offer a rare combination of revolutionary idealism and early postcolonial methodology. I will also argue that Mudimbe's erudite exploration of Western knowledge on sub-Saharan Africa in these two books, albeit somewhat fetishizing in relation to the ‘West’ and its purported oneness, offers more than a meta-philosophical exercise and assessment of Africa's intellectual dependency. Mudimbe's engagement with Foucault's archaeology is a strategy to advocate an epistemological and hence political revolution which reaffirms Mudimbe's filiation with anticolonialist utopianism and Sartre's philosophy of subjectivity

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Exegesis · Idealism · Linguistics · Literature · Political science · Politics · Reading (process · Relation (database · Sociology · Subjectivity · Theology · Utopia · African cultural and philosophical studies · African history and culture studies · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · History · Law · Philosophy

• Les mots et les choses

  Michel Foucault•LES MOTS ET LES CHOSES•1990

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• Representation and terror in V.Y. Mudimbe

  Neil Lazarus•Journal of African Cultural Studies•2005

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• Parables and Fables

  Mario I Aguilar, V Y Mudimbe•Journal of Religion in Africa•1995

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