Scholar of Global Black Studies
Wendell H. Marsh is an Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University–Newark, where he researches and teaches at the intersections of African and diasporic intellectual history, comparative literature, religious studies, and the politics of knowledge production.
“Wielding philology as a praxis of love and as revolutionary method, Wendell Marsh takes the reader on an extraordinary textual journey through the life and times of the Senegalese Muslim scholar, Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945). Decisively postdisciplinary and anti–area studies, Textual Life welcomes the reader into Kamara’s textual world via Malcolm X’s love of study and the long global history of Black liberation philology. It ends in a university classroom in Saint-Louis, Senegal in 2024 with a set of powerful and hope-filled reflections, inspired by the sharp questions of students, on the possibilities for a truly decolonized humanities. Marsh’s Textual Life is one of the most original contributions to the humanities that I have encountered in at least a decade. It should be on the reading list of everyone— not just scholars of Islam or the history of Africa and the Black world—concerned about the present and the future of humanistic inquiry.”