On the predicament of Africanist knowledge: Mudimbe, gnosis and the challenge of the colonial library
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract One of the major conceptual apparatuses in Mudimbe’s critical repertoire is the concept of the ‘colonial library’, an abstraction that denotes the immense body of texts and systems of representation that for centuries has functioned to produce Africa as a paradigm of difference and alterity. A transdisciplinary space the huge knowledge capital of which constitutes and is constitutive of the epistemological locus of Africa’s invention, the colonial library, Mudimbe tells us, also incarnates a paradox: while its knowledge capital serves to justify monstrosities such as Atlantic slavery and colonialism, it has also been from within the foundations of its power knowledge regimes that Africans themselves have sought to interrogate western discourses on Africa, as well as produce their own notions of self-identity, discourses of Otherness and ideologies of alterity. What exactly is this library, and how does it structure knowledge on and about Africa? This article examines the colonial library and the problem it poses for Africanist knowledge. It asks whether discourse on and about Africa outside of the power-knowledge regimes of the library is possible, or, whether Africanist knowledge is always already doomed at its very moment of enunciation since it is always contaminated by the violence of its epistemological region of emergence. The article concludes by engaging with Achille Mbembe in order to illustrate the difficulty of escaping the vicious circle generated by the colonial library. La ‘bibliothèque coloniale’ est un des principaux appareils conceptuels du répertoire critique mudimbéen. Ce concept est une abstraction censée représenter un immense corpus de textes et d’images qui, pendant des siècles, a alimenté l’idée selon laquelle l’Afrique serait le continent de la différence et de l’altérité. Espace transdisciplinaire dont l’énorme capital intellectuel constitue le locus épistémologique de l’invention de l’Afrique, la bibliothèque coloniale, ainsi que Mudimbe le remarque, incarne aussi un paradoxe. D’un côté, elle fut mobilisée pour justifier des monstruosités telles que la traite négrière atlantique et le colonialisme; d’un autre côté, c’est à partir du pouvoir-savoir qui la constituait que les Africains se sont employés à interroger les discours occidentaux sur l’Afrique ainsi qu’à produire leurs propres notions identitaires et, finalement, à élaborer leur singularité discursive et idéologique. En quoi consiste exactement cette bibliothèque et de quelles ressources tire-t-elle profit pour structurer le savoir africain? Cet article se penche en outre sur les défis que la bibliothèque coloniale pose à l’émergence d’un savoir africaniste. D’autres questions connexes seront abordées: peut-on concevoir une réflexion sur l’Afrique en dehors de la dualité pouvoir-savoir qui régit la bibliothèque? Doit-on plutôt se résigner à accepter que tout discours africaniste se trouve, dès le moment de son énonciation, irrémédiablement contaminé par son contexte épistémologique d’origine?
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it