Liverpool University Press V. Y. Mudimbe: Undisciplined Africanism (Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures): 29

V. Y. Mudimbe: Undisciplined Africanism is the first English-language monograph dedicated to the work of Valentin Yves Mudimbe. This book charts the intellectual history of the seminal Congolese thinker, epistemologist, and philologist from the late 1960s to the present day, exploring his major essays and novels. This journey from Elisabethville/Lubumbashi to Louvain, Nanterre, Stanford and Duke University, traces Mudimbe's trajectory against 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 of the macro-critical context in which Mudimbe's thought has unfolded underscores, via close readings of his most influential texts - The Invention of Africa, Parables and Fables, Le Bel Immonde - but also lesser-known texts such Autour de la 'Nation' (1972) and On African Fault Lines (2013), the discursive strategies that he has developed to recover, and recapture (reprendre), the epistemological basis underlying the 'invention' of past and present sub-Saharan Africa. The book shows 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, Benoit Verhaegen, and Johannes Fabian; continental thought: Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Claude Levi-Strauss but also Louis Althusser, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel de Certeau, and Paul Ricoeur; and African thought and philosophy from Africa and the diaspora: L.S. Senghor, Paul Hountondji, Patrice Nganang, and Achille Mbembe.