Textual Life
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.
Endorsements
“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.”
“Textual Life is a seminal work of profoundly diligent scholarship and brilliance with a commendably wide scope. Wendell Marsh’s reading of the Arabic writings by the twentieth-century Senegalese scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara brings a generative new perspective to the fields of African, Islamic, and Black studies, as well as the history of ideas and literary criticism. It exemplifies the sort of intellectual history we need at this moment.”
“In Textual Life, Wendell H. Marsh invites us into another form of return—one anchored in the intellectual and spiritual legacy of West Africa. Through the life of Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864–1945), a towering Senegalese Muslim scholar, Marsh traces how the written word became both resistance and remembrance. Kamara’s monumental History of the Blacks was composed at a time when the colonial imagination denied that Africans possessed either writing or history. His very act of writing thus became a form of defiance, a renewal of a thousand-year-old tradition of study rooted in the Qur’an and the pursuit of knowledge.
Marsh reads Kamara’s work as a meditation on what it means to live textually—to see the world through the lens of reading, interpretation, and divine remembrance. In his telling, the decline of this “textual attitude” within modernity, replaced by bureaucratic and technocratic modes of thinking, mirrors the erosion of the human spirit under empire and its afterlives. Against this, Textual Life calls us to recover the humanities as an enterprise rooted in the love of study, where the study of texts becomes a way to return to ourselves, to history, and to God.”
“The life and monumental work of Shaykh Musa Kamara is a manifestation of the depth of a tradition of West African Islamic scholarship. To fully understand his story as a postcolonial “third space” in which the modernity of Muslim Africa is being invented, we need to use the critical approach of philology. Wendell H. Marsh’s Textual Life is a brilliant example of this approach.”
“Through Shaykh Musa Kamara, Wendell Marsh journeys across Saharo-Sahelian margins to reveal an African Islamic humanism rooted in northern Senegambia. Drawing on overlapping archives, he uncovers how indigenous thought unsettled colonial “Islamology” and offered a counternarrative to the universalizing claims of Muslim societies.”
“This has been one of my favorite reads this year. I ended up spending at least an hour talking about your work with my uncles, so thank you for putting this out there!”