A prominent francophone thinker and writer from sub-Saharan Africa, V. Y. Mudimbe is known for his efforts to bridge Western and African modes of knowledge and for his critiques of a range of disciplines, from classics and philosophy to anthropology and comparative literature. The Mudimbe Reader offers for the first time a ground-breaking work of modern intellectual African history from this essential postcolonial thinker, including new translations of essays previously unavailable in English.

Constituting an intellectual history of the humanities in the late twentieth...

This book explores African religious practice and its relation to African identity. It takes the problem of faith as its central theme, emphasizing the particular existential tensions dividing yet uniting the Christian and the African. Drawing on Heidegger and Sartre, it analyses these tensions underlying and creating the dialogues of hybridity or metissage.

Images of Africa challenges the widely-held idea that Africans are powerless in the creation of self-image. It explores the ways in which image creation is a process of negotiation entered into by a wide range of actors within and beyond the continent - in presidents' offices and party HQs, in newsrooms and rural authorities, in rebel militia bases and in artists' and writers' studies.

Its ten chapters, written by scholars working across the continent and a range of disciplines, develop innovative ways of thinking about how image is produced. They ask: who controls image, how is it...