Wendell Marsh, "Textual Life: Islam, Africa, and the Fate of the Humanities" (Columbia UP, 2025)

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Kamara wagered that Gaden, who had been involved in publishing the cohort of indigenous writers, would be interested in a chronicle about the state that had been established following an Islamic revolution during the peak of the global slave trade. He was right. Gaden wrote back, and surgistically asking Kamara to send the rest without delay. Kamara took this as a favorable sign, and picked up the pace of his work, writing the rest and sending it off within just a few months. But then, Kamara had to wait. He never stopped waiting. Welcome to the African Studies Channel of the new books network. My name is Mazina Cham, and what you just heard was the opening paragraph of one of the most anticipated books of 2025. I'm so honored and delighted to sit today with its author, Wendell Marsh, to discuss this book a little bit. It's coming out in the month of October with Columbia University Press, and we're going to be discussing the contents of the book, but also the path that led Wendell to write this book. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. This has been a dream of mine. Thank you. We're doing something different, and we're doing a first today, which is that we're recording both an audio version of this podcast that you'll be able to listen to on the usual channels of the new books network, as well as a video portion, which we're filming in the beautiful setting of expressed new work, and towards the end of the podcast, we'll explain why we're filming it here. But let's jump in, Wendell, can you just tell us a little bit more about your trajectory, and also how and why did you become a black study scholar interested in Islam in West Africa? I had a severe speech impediment as a small child, and it was so severe in fact that I couldn't pronounce and distinguish about half of the sounds in the English language. And as you can imagine, not being able to communicate often put me in difficult situations, and one of my most kind of vivid childhood memories was on one such occasion. I think I was in kindergarten, and I don't remember all the details, but what I remember is the feeling of some injustice having been done to me. And maybe it was an unshared crayon or something of that effect, but I was trying to plead my case, and I was trying to explain what happened, and I just remember these white faces surrounding me, scolding me, the teachers. And I was in quite the bind, and but thankfully my older sister, Wendell, was able to come and translate for me. She was one of the only people in the world who could understand me when I spoke, and not even my parents could actually understand me often, and they would ask her what was I saying? Well anyway, what that kind of early experience did for me, it's really made me appreciate the power of language, the importance of translation, and the necessity of study. Right, study because following that incident, I was diagnosed and had to do hundreds of hours of speech therapy in a very intensive way throughout my elementary years, and so I grew to be quite comfortable in the language classroom. I had to formally study my native language in that setting, and by middle school I was studying French, and by high school, I actually had found established an Afrocentric book club at my high school. And we were trying to learn the other ABCs, and one of the texts I remember reading was this little essay by Du Bois, this is a short essay that he writes, encouraging African Americans to study French and Portuguese, because half of the continent of Africa's population and much of this diaspora spoke those language. And so the study of language and of different languages, to call on a new meaning and purpose for me, that it was actually a meaning to achieve the Pan-African ideal. And so I really committed myself to the study of French for the purposes of kind of Pan-African black internationalist solidarity and unity. And eventually I would kind of take that interest and skills I'd develop in French to Senegal. When I was at Morehouse College, I went on a trip led by spellman sisters who were doing a service, learning kind of experience in Medina by a cowlack, which is a global hub to Janice Soufism. And while I was there, I was taken as one of the few folks in our group who could speak French to see the sheikh. I had this point with Sheikh Hassan Cise, who's now a pass. And I just remember being in his room, which was filled with people sitting in little circles all around the room, and he was kind of reclined on his kind of Christians, and he was engaging with the different groups of people speaking English, French, Arabic, Wall-Off, and probably other languages that I couldn't even recognize. And what, I mean, that did something very significant for me, because in every space of the room where there wasn't Arabic, where there wasn't a person, there was books and papers, most of which wasn't Arabic. And so at that point in college, I had been in between the choosing between an English major and a history major. I was obsessed with literary form, but the canon was so white. And even those exceptions to that, which we certainly learned that more house, was, I felt there was a constraint by the kind of European colonial languages in which they were written. And I just wanted to know about what literary traditions were available to me that could take me beyond the plantation and the colonial school. And so Sheikh Hassan Cise embodied those things that I knew very early on, right? The power of language, the importance of translation, and the necessity of study. There's many things in what you said now, these moments of translation, the first one would be with your sister, intervening on your behalf and being this good between the power of language of different languages. But also this moment of encounter with the Sheikh. And now it helps me understand better actually the dedication of your book, the first line is in service to the Sheikh. And I'm glad you brought this moment because it helps us also understand better part of the setting that gave rise to this book. And I want to talk. So I want us to go back now to another scholar who is the one that you focus on the most in this book. We opened this discussion in this episode with the story of a failed encounter, the story of a manuscript, and of a broken promise from a French colonial administrator to the Senegalese Muslim scholar, Sheikh Musa Kamara. Tell us more about him, who was Sheikh Musa Kamara? Sheikh Musa Kamara was a brilliant writer from colonial era Senegal, who wrote in many disciplines in the kind of Arab-o-Islamic tradition. He was born in 1864 and he dies in 1945, and he's best known for writing a major history of West Africa, known in Arabic as Zuhur al-Basatine, Fitarir al-Sawadine, or flowers from among the gardens in the history of the blacks. And he's quite remarkable and singular, not because he was a writer or author, he's a part of a very robust intellectual culture in West Africa. But he was a bit idiosyncratic. Well, what I found interesting in kind of returning to Kamara and thinking about his reception is that in the years between 2013 and 2023, there's been more work published about Kamara than in any other tenure period while he was living or since he perished. And so we might ask, well, what were some of the contextual factors that led to this resurgence of interests in Kamara? And it actually has to do with two of his other works, actually, have a couple of his works here. So there's Tebshul Khayif, the Heiran, Tebz-Kirrihi, Besah, Te Rahmat al-Bal, Karim al-Menden, or the announcement of the fearful and confused in his reminder of the breath of God's mercy, the generous bestower God. Kamara writes these very kind of poetic and cosmic titles for his works. So that work is an autobiography, right? And there's another work that has really come to the attention of people, which is his Akhtar-Raghavine, Fizjihad, Bad-Nabi-Ein, or those who want Jihad the most after the prophets. It's actually a very long time, I'll spare you. But in that work, he offers a critique of Jihad as a legitimate practice in essentially the modern period. So it's a historical critique. And he says that the biggest problem with Jihad is that there's no prophetic leadership to authorize it first and foremost. And that in the absence of that, this, the major loss of Muslim life, which in his concrete historical experience accompanied the entire ways of Jihad that occurred between the 17th century and the 19th century. And so this was an important and timely argument for him. And so in the context that we think about 2013 to 2023, what was happening? Well, you know, you know, better, far better than I about the insurgency in Mali in 2012, and how the broader, kind of regional dynamics of a kind of very militant Islamist politics, made local references for more quiet Islam very attractive. And there have been a number of scholars who have found in Kamra such a reference. There's been great work that's been done by people like Muhammad Sayed Baa, a kind of a rabiff phone intellectual who's currently leading the Kamra Research Center in Senegal and in Gangl. But also Abdul Malal Jop and in Bilalow down at Duke and many others, right? So there's like this robust return to Kamra, right? And this isn't the first time there's been such a renaissance of Kamra studies. The first one, arguably, was in the late 1960s and early 1970s, right? And this post-independence or nationalist period in Senegal and where in which scholars such as Amr Sam and Mustafa and Jai recover Kamra as an important writer of Arabic and kind of making the argument that this is a part of the national literature. And in ways that aren't too dissimilar to the ways in which black feminists in the United States recovered someone like Zoranil Hurston, around the same time period. And so in the work when I describe the fate of the humanities, I'm interested in the returns of someone like Kamra. Now at the heart of the book is a very specific story about Kamra's struggle to get his 1700 page manuscript translated and published by colonial officials. And I won't go into detail here, you'll just have to order the book. But that story is kind of a compelling parable for us that is not only the story of this life, but a larger story about the fate of the humanities amidst political, technological, and epistemic change. And I think you show really well in the book these sort of like different periods and different readings of Kamra and there is there is something that various audiences and people speaking to various publics in specific contexts across time can get from this author or decide to read into this author. And I think you yeah, you just actually great job as showing these successive readings of Kamra and there may be still you know new readings of Kamra are waiting us in the future, who knows. I believe there is. Yeah. And we'll come back to that and what this means for the fate of the humanities. I want to go back a little bit and really plant the context, both geographical and historical that this author emerges out of you introduce him to us a little bit, but this your book is also in a way. One story of the encounter between Islam and French colonialism, but set in a very specific space, a region of West African name, foot a torro that is today located at what is now the border between synagogue and more it in you and that also has significance. Again, relating to the encounter between French colonialism and Islam, so can you explain to us a little bit more that relationship and how you understand it what is specific about the encounter between French colonialism in its various iterations and Islam as it happens in this region of West Africa, foot a torro in the lifetime of Shakum Sakamara and the reduced receiving it also. I think one really effective way of understanding this history and this historical specificity is actually thinking a little bit before Kamra, right, the generation that precedes him and thinking it through three figures in particular, right. Bul Mughdad Sek, Hajjumaratal and Fedorb, right, the French kind of who's often considered the architect of colonial synagogue, Louis Fedorb. So if we take Bul Mughdad Sek, right, he's the first salaried employee, African salaried employee of the colony, right, he is an interpreter, a kind of a guide, he facilitates a trade going up and down the synagogue river, right. When he's active in toward the mid 19th century, he is at one time a kind of representative of Muslim civil society in the colony of San Luis, right, and a kind of reliable partner of the colonial state. Now, Bul Mughdad Sek comes from a scholarly family, right, that long been established in St. Louis, a family engaged in long distance trade, right, both across the Sahara and across the Atlantic. And he comes to, you know, kind of represent in a lot of ways, the set of Muslim interests that saw themselves as being aligned with a mercantile presence that would eventually become a colonial one. Right? And we really get a sense of his politics and his kind of vision of the world when juxtaposed with someone like Haj Omar Taouh, right? Who is in many ways the most consequential figure of 19th century West Africa, at least in the Sahelian zone, right? For the ways in which he revolutionizes the political, economic, and religious landscape, an intellectual landscape of the region, right? He is a Tijani scholar, right? Who leaves a hallowar on the banks of the synagogue River in Fututuro and travels to Mecca and Medina on religious pilgrimage. He serves as a kind of a student and disciple of some of the major Tijani scholars who are in the Rebim Peninsula at the time. And he comes back and on the way there and on the Panez Rechar and he actually spends a lot of time in what's now in Northern Nigeria. He develops a reputation of being as someone with a lot of barakah of charisma or grace that has like real effects in the world. He is respected as an author and a scholar. He writes this well known sophisticated poetry that our colleague Amr Sayed has done some really fantastic work on. But he eventually declares a jihad in 1852 and at first is against the followers of ancestral religions in West Africa. At this time, Islam had already had a, you know, 100 year history or so, right? And most importantly, a generation before Omar, there had been several initiatives to make Islam de-guiding framework for collective life, right? Before the so-called age of jihad or Islamic revolutions, Islam was one point of reference among many, right? One form of life among many. But with that shift of Islamic revolutions, you have a social political economic revolution that centralized Islamic paradigms and Islamic normativity as central in several pockets, right? So, Fudotoro, Massina, which you know very well, of course, and other and a few others. And in between were these pockets of followers of ancestral religions. And first, Hadhromor's project seems to be connecting the Muslim political formations, but at a certain point that process falls back on itself. And he actually declares jihad on another Muslim state in violation of kind of what is conventionally considered as a core principle of Islamic international affairs. Anyway, the reason why he is important is because he in so many ways is the exact opposite of Bul Mughdad Sek and his vision of collective Muslim life, right? Hadhromor wants to establish a space of Islamic economics that is actually kind of distinct and insulated from the Atlantic economy, right? The generation before both Sek and Tau, there had been a political struggle in our colleague Rudolph Ware, I think, it shows this very well, to kind of delink, so to speak, from the slave economy and work by Paul Lovejoy also shows this. Anyway, the third figure of that moment is also illustrative though, right? Louis Federer establishes the architecture of the Islamic state, right? And he was a military engineer by training, right? He trained at Metz, the Grande Cole in France, and his attitude toward Islam was an instrumental one, right? And a lot of the kind of forms of knowledge, the institutions of learning that are established in colonial synagogue are set up by him, right? He also sets up the tribunal in the kind of schema for Muslim citizenship in the colony. And between these three, you can kind of triangulate an understanding of Islam as one of debate, one of a fertile kind of intellectual life, right? And this kind of characteristic and feature of Muslim scholars who are confronting the ravages of the an emergent capitalism with the slave trade and the kind of solutions they come up with and the responses they come up with really define the kind of repertoire and just culture of debate that come right in herds and that he very enthusiastically engages it as he comes of age shortly thereafter. So, Poulmog d'Azsac, Hajj Amartel, and Rifid Elb as kind of the, particularly the first two is a juxtaposition I had not thought about and now you're making me think, rethink. Some of the ways to think about this era and this and this territory, but you're right, I guess these three characters are instrumental and what they represent also as I don't want to reduce them to archetypes, but what they represent instrumental to understanding the world that Shrechung Sakamara is born into when it works in. And just to elaborate a little bit, right? So Hajj Amart, you know, is a Hajj and he goes, he crosses that that Sahelian route and then he, you know, crosses over and goes north to the Egypt and eventually into the Rebian Peninsula. But sec, in response to Hajj Amart, actually goes to the French and say, you know what, we need our own Hajj, right, to combat the propaganda of Hajj Amart and actually the French fund secs Hajj and this is actually the beginning of an entire institution of the Hajj and Senegal and it becomes also a diplomatic mission for the colony. So just to kind of illustrate a little bit what I mean by how we can use these figures to think through that context. No, absolutely. And I think again, it picks a really clear picture of some of the different forces that play in shaping the region and shaping it in that moment. I want to turn to another aspect of your book. It's not an aspect in many ways. It's the core of the book, actually, because as you're saying, you introduce these various readings of camera, of camera, but it's, this is not actually an intellectual biography of Sakamara that you're writing. It's also not a reception history of how different people in different epochs have read and understood his work, although the book does all of that. But that's not quite what it is. At its core, this is a book about philology. Philology, which you, again, you open the book with, which you describe as the love of study and which you also describe, I'm a paraphrasing you, I think, as an under-recognized practice in the tradition of black thought. I'm going to want us to linger on this a little bit and to really, really understand where you're getting at with this, to really understand what, when though means with philology and how he deploys it in this book, I've actually asked him to read an excerpt from his book, explaining exactly what philology is, how he understands it, and the power that he had, this concept has had for collective liberation. All right, I can go ahead and read this. Philology has often been thought of as either a contemporary technical discipline or an antiquated soft science that ordered human difference in racial and religious hierarchies in a time better left in the past. That is, philology was a quintessentially colonial form of knowledge. But if we approach it differently, as a human tradition, across time, and cultural difference, as indeed the love of study, we might better appreciate what the textual attitude has met in places as diverse as Malcolm X's prison cell and Kamara's Riverside village of the edge of the French colonial empire. Once prized for what it could do, and then dismissed as irrelevant, philology now returns as a vitally human orientation toward the world. In this account, considering philology as a particular form of knowledge, has been a way to track Developments in the organization of knowledge. More broadly. Unburdened from the work of representing reality, Filology as the love of study and the cultivation of the textual attitude, promises a future for the humanities beyond the world's slavery and colonization made, thus, the story of the Synagglies Muslim scholar, Sheikh Musa Kamra, who devoted his life to reading and producing monumental texts that were initially celebrated but eventually disregarded before being retrieved by post-colonial intellectuals, provides a parable of the rise, fall, and return or the fate of the humanities. Alright, so before we recreated the book as I told you this was the most wendell paragraph ever and that is why I needed to hear it in your voice. Yeah. Really? So verboten in convolutism. Those are your worries. I did not say that. Extra. We can just call it extra. Yeah, you're a little extra. In the sense, and I really mean, you know, we've known each other for several years now, because I think at the core of it, you're the person I know the most, who lives a textual life. I find the book and thinking back about, about many of our discussions, but also just how I see you moving in the world. I was like, yeah, this tracks. The fate of the humanities, which you see as represented in the parable of Kamra, but it goes way beyond him. The fate of the humanities is something to be hopeful about if I read and understood correctly, and you have to be the last man standing in 2025, and he actually has hope, who is actually hopeful about the fate of the humanities. Explain that to me. So I think first we have to distinguish the humanities as kind of a mode of being, you know, subjectivity from higher education, as a particular institutional arrangement in a specific historical moment. Right. Fundamentally, the crisis that we're kind of dancing around, right, isn't really the crisis of the humanities. It's a crisis of higher education more broadly, right. A couple of weeks ago, Indiana University announced the closure of 100 programs, right. Not just African-American studies in French and ballet, but basic science, right. Anything remotely theoretical, and in the coverage of this massive restructuring, the comments I believe of the governor, was that, you know, we need something more practical, right. Another instance that I read about recently was the University of Tulsa, an Oklahoma, right. Which had an honors program that was modeled on the Great Books format, right. You know, Western civilization from the Greeks to the Greeks, so we can say, but more or less, right. That was the model, which is an important model, right. Great books, serious engagement. There's an essay that was in making the rounds by the dean of that program. And she said that the closure of that program wasn't because of low student enrollment. It wasn't because it wasn't making money. Actually, they had a robust student participation that was a profitable program. And yet, the board of governors and these folks who actually know nothing about higher education, often times, come in and actually say these programs aren't doing what we need them to, right. And so we're in the midst of a hostile takeover of specific universities and of particular programs, right. And we see a conservative, I'm missing my words, a fascist regime that is conducting a pincher movement, right, on elite universities from one side and targeting these kind of more public schools and restructuring their programs on the other, to completely transform higher education as we know it, right. And that's not about the humanities as such, right. The humanities just comes to be like a stand-in as a kind of, you know, example of uselessness. Having made that very important distinction, what I want to emphasize is the humanities is much more than a set of disciplines or a set of subjects, especially, right. I want to following a kind of religious studies perspective approach the humanities as the commitment to reading again, right. So this is an attitude, right. This is a posture. This is an orientation toward the world through serious, prolonged, and repeated readings, right. I, you know, I talk about the textual attitude in the book that I take from Edur Said. It's a kind of passing reference in his orientalism to develop a critique of orientalism. But in the book, I kind of repurpose it to kind of think through how we might think of the place of the textual attitude and an algorithmic age that we're in, right. In a time when, you know, AI gives us the illusion of the obsolescence of knowledge, right. The warrant for a serious engaged reading of study can't be kind of market metrics, right. Can't even be some political utility, right. It actually, it's only justification is a set of values that are profoundly traditional. Dare I say religious. And so in short, yes, I'm very hopeful about the fate of the humanities, not because of a calculation, right. Actually, and here I'm thinking about a recent podcast that the anthropologists and theorists tell us, I gave. Where he kind of looked at looked out on our current world, right. Seeing genocide in Gaza and to that we can add the extraction in war and Congo and the, you know, wars in Sudan and they kind of gangs that terrorized Haiti, etc. If you kind of look at the evidence in order to make a calculation, right, we can only be pessimistic, right. There's no room for optimism, but hope he argues is distinct from optimism or pessimism because hope isn't based on calculation, right. It is actually about a deeply profound commitment that is only founded on belief. In a very practical sense, I want to understand as an educator, how you translate that in your practice as an educator. So the most important translation I can make is one that emphasizes slowness, right. Care, attention, right. In one of the main courses I teach, I teach the here at Rutgers, the intro to African studies. And there's a kind of semester one and semester two sequence. But what I'm trying to do in both of those courses is practice close reading, right. Reading here might be a passage. It might be a painting. It might be a photograph, you know, some kind of object. And I give them a certain protocol for reading, right, which I developed in studying Kamara, right, and his mode of commentary, right, where you kind of confront an object or a claim. And the first thing you have to do is notice it, right. And then you describe it to kind of generate language around it. And then through the language itself, you might formulate a question. And then all of my classes, that's what I'm trying to teach this, Indie Q as I like to say, notice describe question. And I want to be clear, it's very basic, right. It's very simple. It's very straightforward. But it's much harder to do, right. but in it requires practice. And over the course of this video. you can do it, right? But what I'm teaching there is this textual attitude that engagement. But I'm also teaching something else to accompany the textual. I often structure the the course around critical needs, breath, housing, water, food, pleasure. And there I'm really influenced by Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture from 1993. She talks about dead language and living language. A lot of ways, I think if you return to that speech, she is announcing AI, right? And she's announcing the problem and the risk of a philosophy of language that is completely complicit in power, right? So she talks about the language of journalism and of the state and ultimately of power. It's a dead language. And she contrasts that with a living language, right? And so by attending to critical needs, we read last semester for example, Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower, right? You know, after the fires and Al-Tadina and January, a lot of people were kind of thinking about this text and the way it kind of prefigured what actually happened, you know? And we read that with an attention to the critical needs. These critical needs is that which is needed to sustain life. So between those kind of two moves that I make and any course, which is about close reading and textual engagement and the commitment to life, that's my whole, you know, substance of what I have to profess. And it's not just in the classroom, right? We started off this discussion, I'm explaining that we're sitting now at Express Newark. The place where you put together, co-curated and exhibits, powers of the unseen. And we're recording this in in late July 2025, which means people really, really only have a few days to come catch this exhibit. And I cannot beg everyone enough to come have a look. Please, but please explain to us, what is this exhibit, powers of the unseen unseen? And what's going on? And what are you trying to do in terms of also outside of the classroom, just opening up these forms of knowledge, these forms of reading, not just text, objects, art into the community? Yeah. Powers of the unseen at its core is about the politics of representation. But it uses a core, Sufi, and more generally Islamic concept of the Reib or the unseen as a way to kind of see through this problem, right? And so the, you know, traditionally, the the Reib appears, you know, in the Quran many times as a core concept. And it refers to fundamentally the divine, right? And an entire realm that is beyond human perception, right? And there was an analogy with the tradition of Muslim aesthetics, which has for, you know, hundreds of years been primarily what we would describe as Sufi of trying to express that inexpressible, right? And so there was an analogy there with the problem of representation of what we were calling the conundrum of representation today, right? So this exhibit wasn't so much about kind of Muslims in Africa and the Mali's and in Newark, right? It was a way of seeing the world through the concepts and aesthetic traditions that those experiences offer all of humanity. And so it consisted of about 13 international artists, 12 of which are alive, right? One deceased the great Gordon Parks, but there were, you know, Chester Higgins and Yaziyah Lipur and Camilla Janan Macheed and Malik Welley, Amina Caduce. So, you know, so many really phenomenal artists and all of the works engaged with photography as a medium, right? And conventionally, you know, photography is a kind of, you know, spicy subject when it comes to Islamic thought, right? There's a whole robust debate about the permissibility of photography. But there were these very interesting experiments and engagements with the form itself that we wanted to explore with these artists. And there was an experience I had actually that I would like to share of a community member, a kind of an elder in the kind of Newark Muslim community, who came kind of in the past few weeks. And she visited the various exhibitions, powers of the unseen is one exhibit among several part of the annual theme for Express Newark, a ritual with that my colleagues, Salami Shatillit, kind of in a Leah Allen, you know, directed and curated the whole kind of ensemble. But what the comment of this community member, she said, you know, you come in, you see pictures of Newark area, African-American Muslims. And they were works by Zingh Aoyo, in which woven prayers where they're like these tapestries of prayer mats and family portraits. And the the elders said, you know, oh, that's Islam, right? The first level. But then she said, when you come upstairs, you come into the gallery in which powers of the unseen is, you know, you move through the other exhibitions, they take you from Islam to Eman or faith, right? But then by the time you get into powers of the unseen, you arrive to Issaan, right? Or spiritual excellence. And I was really struck by her reading of the exhibit, right? Because by her own admission, she wasn't an art person. You know, she didn't really know how to engage with the space. But then she had this incredibly sophisticated reading, grounded in the tradition of a self-understanding of how to read it. And I could see she was really quite moved by the exhibit. And, you know, according when I was moved by her being moved, that I couldn't imagine to have achieved such a thing. So I'm really grateful for the other curators. Alex Dika Sagerman, O Ternai, San Drinko Lard. You know, we worked together for three years to put this exhibit on. It has been an incredible life experience. And what an amazing endorsement you receive from this visitor, from this community member. Really, I cannot urge people enough to come check out the exhibit with the time that's remaining. So there's been powers of the unseen and that's this exhibition that you've co-curated. That's occupied you for several years now and it's coming to a close. The book, "Textural Life" Islam, African, the faith of the humanities. Coming out in October, although I think people can pre-ordered it right now with Columbia University Press. And there's a discount, a 20% discount, CUP 20 if you buy it directly from the publisher. After these big projects, what's next? What does the future look like? What are you? What are you on? What are you working on? What are you plotting? What's, yeah, what is next? As far as I can tell from every indication, the future looks African. And so I'm actually going to be moving to Muhammad 6th University Polytechnic in Morocco, where I'll be an associate professor of African literature and philosophy, where I'll be continuing my work in global black studies, but grounding it on the continent in that kind of Walter Rottene tradition of grounding, doing so on the continent. And I have a few different projects that I hope to take off, but I'm really interested in developing networks of collaboration of African-based scholars, folks doing community engaged work. Alongside the, you know, the textual commitments that I have in study of Kamara want to kind of make his work more widely available in conjunction with the Kamara Research Center in Senegal. And I also'm continuing work that I've been doing with the Gupta Xion Day 2 critique. in San Luis Senegal with Abdul Rahman Sack and students and colleagues there, which is a decolonial collective. And so, you know, there are tons of work to do and I look forward to doing it on the continent. And I look forward to keeping up to, you know, what you'll be up to, this was not our first, that is definitely not our last conversation about your work. And I know about these things that we've been thinking on for quite some time. And really, really, I hope people engage with your book. It's a beautiful book. There's a lot to be learned from it both in terms of thinking but also in terms of practice. What you said about, about you're working the classroom and as an educator, like really now struck with me. So again, I just hope that people will read the book, engage with it and read it slowly as we've learned and adopt the textual life and textual attitude. Thank you so much, Wendell, for joining us on the podcast. It was really really such a pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you so much, Wendell. This has been a gift.