USA Africa Dialogue Series - Magnificent Poetry of Time : Nimi Wariboko on Future, Present and Past

 One of the best things I have ever read. 

From "Acknowledgements" in The Split God: Pentecostalism and Critical Theory ( 2018) by Nimi Wariboko :

 

"Authors write acknowledgments to publicly record their indebtedness to the living and the dead who helped them in the process of researching and writing their books. I have done a lot of this in my previous sixteen monographs and four edited volumes. Now that I am on my seventeenth monograph, it occurred to me that my acknowledgment should properly focus on the not-yet born. I expect their coming onto the academic scene, to carry forward the ideas in this book. I acknowledge their accomplishments of this task and the claim past scholarship has on them.

 

This approach to acknowledgment is very important for those of us who are Africans and/or Pentecostals. We write not only with an eye on the current intellectual questions and debates, but also with an ear on the distant sound of the footsteps of coming generations. We are building a body of work for the next generations, whose coming is expected and whose joy in inheriting and encountering works and ideas left for them by their own deeply excites me. I acknowledge here the inspiration I

received from the generations of Africans and Pentecostals who are coming after me. I acknowledge the intellectual powers of those who come after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie. I have no greater joy than to expect that my brothers and sisters, my children, will be committed to the quest for truth rooted in the public intercourse  of rigorous ideas.

Now let me turn to the past and present generations who assisted me in bringing the idea of this book to fruition...

I also acknowledge all my teachers, past and present, in formal and informal settings, who helped to form and inspire me to work at the uncomfortable intersectionality of disciplines. I am a scholar on the boundary. I work on the boundaries of economics and ethics, economics and religion, economics and philosophy, ethics and theology, philosophy and theology, social history and ethics, social sciences and theology, and present and not-yet-present knowledges. My thinking always functions at

an interstitial site, wrestling in a contact zone of disciplines that is neither/ nor. This is a site that opposes binary opposition, oscillating between spheres of knowledge. It is the fragile, fleeting, and slippery para-site of erotic, new, refreshing insights and lights. I am talking of the uncanny non-place that promises to birth the underivably new in history. My soul finds deep peace at this frontier, the edge of knowledge that is always approaching and withdrawing approach. This book reflects this orientation

of my scholarship. And I thank you, the reader, for your forbearance in walking and working with me in this unhomely space."

--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.