Parution : ouvrage anglophone sur V.Y. Mudimbe

V. Y. Mudimbe: Undisciplined Africanism

Pierre-Philippe Fraiture

• Elucidates the complex work of one of the most significant contemporary African thinkers, V. Y. Mudimbe

• A cutting edge, interdisciplinary book combining philosophy, postcolonial studies and African studies

• Mudimbe, currently Newman Ivey White Professor of Literature at Duke University, remains an influential critic

This important book charts the intellectual history of Valentin Yves Mudimbe, seminal Congolese thinker, epistemologist, and philologist, from the late 1960s to the present, exploring his major essays and novels. It traces his trajectory through major debates on African nationalism, Panafricanism, neo-colonialism, negritude, pedagogy, Christianisation, decolonisation, anthropology, postcolonial representations and the role of Antiquity in postcolonial scholarship. This exploration underscores, via close readings of his most influential texts (The Invention of Africa, Parables and Fables, Le Bel Immonde) and lesser-known texts such as Autour de la ‘Nation’ and On African Fault Lines, the discursive strategies that Mudimbe has developed to recover, and recapture (reprendre), the epistemological basis underlying the ‘invention’ of past and present sub-Saharan Africa. The book demonstrates that Mudimbe’s intellectual career has been informed and enriched by a series of decisive and often antagonistic dialogues with some of the key exponents of Africanism (Herodotus, EW Blyden, Placide Tempels), continental and postcolonial thought (Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Claude Lévi-Strauss), and African thought and philosophy from Africa and the diaspora (L.S. Senghor, Patrice Nganang, and Achille Mbembe).

Contemporary France and Francophone Cultures, 29

256pp. 234 x 156 mm

HB ISBN: 9781846318948 • £70.00

September 2013