Mudimbe’s Fetish of the West and Epistemological Utopianism

This article will provide a close reading of Mudimbe’s early collections of essays L’Autre Face du royaume (1973) and L’Odeur du père (1982). In the English-language exegesis of Mudimbe’s writings, these two key texts have been unduly neglected in favour of The Invention of Africa (1988), an essay which, from a chronological point of view, coincided more conveniently with the advent of the postcolonial ‘turn’. I will however contend that these two collections offer a rare combination of revolutionary idealism and early postcolonial methodology. I will also argue that Mudimbe’s erudite exploration of Western knowledge on sub-Saharan Africa in these two books, albeit somewhat fetishizing in relation to the ‘West’ and its purported oneness, offers more than a meta-philosophical exercise and assessment of Africa’s intellectual dependency. Mudimbe’s engagement with Foucault’s archaeology is a strategy to advocate an epistemological and hence political revolution which reaffirms Mudimbe’s filiation with anticolonialist utopianism and Sartre’s philosophy of subjectivity.