The Elusive Mudimbe: A Feminist Journey Through His Novels

The many issues Mudimbe engages with in his body of work make it almost impossible to locate him in a single discipline or theoretical tradition. Mudimbe himself rejects labels since doing so, he argues, reduces the complexity of human beings and their experiences. The entry point for most critics of his prose fiction is the way that Mudimbe’s novels shed light on colonisation and traditional order, notably by analyzing the tensions between modernity and tradition. This chapter proposes a different reading of Mudimbe’s novels from a feminist perspective with the intention of exposing an angle of his thought that has received little attention. This reading enables new insights into how his anti-colonial discourse focuses on women’s situation, as well as gender relations and sexuality in Africa. It suggests that focusing on women’s situation and the issue of sexuality enables the foregrounding of new insights that adds a layer of complexity to Mudimbe’s thought, thus further shedding light on the expansive and multi-faceted nature of his complex, yet elusive, thought.