Textual Life recasts the role of knowledge in the making of a colonial and postcolonial nation, offering a new literary and intellectual-historical approach to Islam in Africa.

The book focuses on Senegalese Muslim scholar Shaykh Musa Kamara (1864-1945) and his monumental history of West Africa, History of the Blacks. Kamara sought to publish a bilingual Arabic and French edition, but the project was undermined by the French state’s disregard.

Textual Life presents 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 a “textual attitude,” an orientation to the world mediated by reading. Colonial humanists shared this attitude, taking an interest in African texts and traditions. However, their successors disdained such dialogue, echoing the algorithmic antihumanism ascendant today.

Drawing on Kamara’s work, colonial archives, and postcolonial knowledge production within Senegal, Textual Life offers a decolonial vision of the humanities. By engaging with African and Muslim intellectual resources, Marsh demonstrates how thinkers like Kamara can help us find a future after empire.