One of the classic critiques of scholarship on Africa (and conceptualizations thereof more broadly) was penned by the Congolese scholar (and Duke professor) V. Y. Mudimbe in his "The Invention of Africa" (1988), which was followed by this book, "The Idea of Africa" (1994). This book revolves around the idea of "Africa" as an idea, meaning how it has been employed historically, through cultural expressions and so forth. Landmark contributions, as these are, often appear less groundbreaking when read decades later, which is more a product of the mode of critique becoming much more integrated into our thinking than it does the uniqueness of the day. A few notes:
"As I read some critics of my books, my first reaction was to remain silent. To use a metaphor, why should I be forced to play chess with people who do not seem to know the rules of the game? In effect, beyond positivism, I have been trying to understand the powerful yet invisible epistemological order that seems to make possible, at a given period, a given type of discourse about Africa - or, for that matter, about any social group in Africa, Asia, or Europe." (p. xiv)
"A comprehensive study of the "terra nullius" politics by Keller, Lisitzyn, and Mann (1938) indicates that between 1400 and 1800 not one non-European nations was considered to have the right "to possess or to transfer any dominion in the international law sense."" (p. 33)
"The sequence of analyses in this book has focused on two main significant issues: first, the Greco-Roman thematization of otherness and its articulation in such concepts as 'barbarism' and 'savagery'; second, the complex process that has organized in Europe the idea of Africa. It is, in any case, troubling to note that since the fifteenth century the will to truth in Europe seems to espouse perfectly a will to power." (p. 212)
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