Three months after I arrived in Ben Guerir, my books finally showed up.
Fifty-odd boxes. My book collection is starting to become a problem. It’s the kind of scene that produces equal parts pleasure and mild paralysis. Where do you even begin?
I found myself thinking, almost immediately, of Walter Benjamin’s 1931 essay “Unpacking My Library,” a meditation on book collecting, memory, and intellectual life. Benjamin suggests that the moment of unpacking—before books settle back into the quiet order of shelves—is unusually revealing. Not because it is chaotic, but because it loosens habits of thought. Books reappear as objects, as traces of past encounters, as invitations to future ones.
This episode of Textual Life is dedicated to the memory of a great friend, Asad Haider, who first introduced me to Benjamin and to critical theory more broadly when we were students in Paris. Much of how I learned to read—and what I learned to care about in reading—was shaped through those early conversations. It felt fitting, then, that Benjamin’s essay would frame an episode devoted to books, friendship, and intellectual life in motion.
It was in that spirit that I recorded this episode with Mamadou Diallo (PhD Candidate at Columbia University) who happened to be in Morocco while I was unpacking. Rather than staging a formal interview, we opened boxes and let the conversation follow the books. What emerged was a wandering itinerary across theory, African and diasporic thought, Islamic intellectual history, political philosophy, literature, and pedagogy.
Timothy Mitchell, Sven Lindqvist, and Carl Schmitt drew us into reflections on colonial modernity, sovereignty, and the varieties of intellectual work. Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s The Undercommons opened a sustained discussion about refusal and intellectual freedom, which Mamadou linked to Fabien Eboussi Boulaga’s critique of le nous-aussi-isme—the impulse to prove, endlessly, that “we too” possess philosophy and civilization. This resonated with Toni Morrison’s insistence that racism is a distraction, diverting energy away from invention and toward endless justification.
From there, we turned to broader questions of rupture and continuity in global Black thought. Arthur Jafa, R. A. Judy, and Paul Gilroy opened onto debates about inheritance, invention, and usable pasts. Islamic intellectual histories in Africa—through the work of Nile Green, Ousmane Kane, and Rudolph Ware—allowed us to rethink West Africa not as a periphery, but as a center of scholarly authority and pedagogical experimentation. Valentine Mudimbe framed questions of epistemic rupture and the conceptual labor required to think Africa otherwise.
As the boxes kept opening, fiction and poetry entered the scene—Nuruddin Farah, Morgan Parker, Ousmane Sembène, Felwine Sarr—shifting the register from critique to imagination. Sembène’s films, especially Xala, became a way of thinking about decolonization, satire, and historical consciousness, while Sarr’s fiction opened onto questions of postcolonial interiority and Senegalese modernity.
Threaded through all of this was a persistent institutional concern: What is the task of the African university to come?
Drawing on the historical sociology of Abdoulaye Bara Diop and the work of Mamadou Diouf, we reflected on why foundational analyses of Senegalese society remain largely confined to academic spaces. The priority placed on disciplinary fundamentals—often imported wholesale—has come at the expense of collective self-reflection. Against this backdrop, we sketched another horizon, inspired by Walter Rodney and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o: a university oriented toward thinking its own historical specificity, vernacular languages, conceptual and formal invention, and what Mamadou described as grounding—the effort to embed intellectual life in social worlds rather than abstract it from them.
Running quietly beneath the episode was another theme: friendship as a condition of thought. My library became not simply an archive of books, but a record of relationships, disagreements, and unfinished projects.
By the end, we had barely scratched the surface. Only a fraction of the boxes had been opened. But perhaps that, too, was the point. A library is never fully unpacked. It remains a space of return and anticipation, an accumulation of past work and a staging ground for futures still in formation.
