The Re-invention of Africa: Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond

ALI A. MAZRUI (2005)

State University of New York at Binghamton

Edward W. Said has been described as one of the founders of postcolonial studies. But the claim that Said is a postcolonial innovator should not be interpreted to mean that hiswork does not examine European colonialism in Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. On the contrary, much of the focus in both Orientalism (1979) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) is on the classical era of European imperialism, and about literary interpretations of the colonized peoples, going back to Joseph Conrad and long before him.

V. Y. Mudimbe is, in certain aspects, a thinker in the same tradition as Edward Said. Both of them illustrate that the best time for interpreting colonialism is in the postcolonial era. After all, one can best evaluate the preceding day after the sun has set. In Hegel’s immortal words, “The owl of Minerva spreads out its wings only with the falling of the dusk” (Philosophy of Right, 1812). Postcolonial studies include such an assessment of the preceding era of colonialism.