Oludamini Ogunnaike is Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy at the University of Virginia. He received his PhD in African Studies and the Study of Religion from Harvard University and is the author of "Deep Knowledge: Ways of Knowing in Sufism and Ifa, Two West African Intellectual Traditions" (PSU Press, 2020), "Poetry in Praise of Prophetic Perfection: West African Madīḥ Poetry and its Precedents" (Islamic Texts Society, 2020), and "The Book of Clouds" (Fons Vitae, 2024). His work focuses on Arabic Sufi poetry, Sufism in West Africa, Yoruba orisa traditions, and Black Studies.

While much of Sylvia Wynter’s work is directly applicable to the social sciences generally, and the study of religion in particular, her essays “Africa, the West, and the Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man” and “‘Genital Mutilation’ or ‘Symbolic Birth’ Female Circumcision, Lost Origins, and the Aculturalism of Feminist/Western thought” deal the most directly with African religious traditions. Despite the many profound insights these works contain, this talk argues that many of Wynter’s characterizations of African traditions fall prey to what Johannes Fabian has called the “allochronism of anthropology,” the “persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in time other than the present of the producer of the anthropological discourse.” Moreover, despite Wynter’s appreciation for the significance of African religious traditions, by placing them at the beginning of an exogenous evolutionary timeline and using them as a kind of “mirror” for the modern West and an example of another form of “sociogenesis” to be moved beyond, her constructive project appears to replicate some of the same strategies of exclusionary inscription she so cogently diagnoses in other “codes” or orders of knowledge.

The talk concludes with an assessment of the radical potential (and actuality) of African religious traditions such as Ifá and Sufism to articulate the kind of re-definition of “humanity” for which Wynter calls, arguing that Césaire’s poetic “science of the Word,” toward which Wynter looks, may already exist in these traditions. That is, while Wynter’s work functions as a kind of upāya (liberating ruse) that works within the present, biocentric Western order of knowledge to liberate us from it (from the “inside-out”), traditions such as Ifá and Sufism continue to function from epistemological grounds “outside” this order, complementing Wynterian and other decolonial approaches by working from the “outside-in.”

Sponsored by Religious Studies Program, Department of Anthropology, Africana Studies and Research Center, and Society for the Humanities