Development as Rebellion, the massive biographical study of Julius K. Nyerere, written by three leading Tanzanian scholars and published in 2020 by the august Dar es Salaam imprint Mkuki na Nyota, illustrates how authors and audience are entangled in discursive practice. Jacques Derrida’s postmodern concept of iterability suggests that any message, let alone a nationalist biography, never exists in a stable univocal state, but that its meaning takes form, continually mutating, in an interactive social context between author and audience. It is not merely that the authors address an audience imprinted with the intellectual traditions known as the “Dar es Salaam School” of the University of Dar es Salaam; they engage not just the concerns of that audience, of which they are themselves members, but their priorities and categories of thought. This essay offers a review of Development as Rebellion as evidence for a theoretical argument about how an audience shapes the composition of a piece of writing, and how this helps us address the ongoing debate about the way scholarly authority in African studies tends to reside outside Africa. Addressing this circumstance must begin counterintuitively with questions about the audience of Africanist scholarship rather than its authors.

中文翻译：

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政治传记和受众的代理

《发展即反叛》是朱利叶斯·K·尼雷尔的大型传记研究，由坦桑尼亚三位顶尖学者撰写，由庄严的达累斯萨拉姆出版社 Mkuki na Nyota 于 2020 年出版，阐释了作者和观众如何纠缠在话语实践中。雅克·德里达的后现代可重复性概念表明，任何信息，更不用说民族主义传记，都不会以稳定的单义状态存在，而是在作者和观众之间互动的社会背景中形成并不断变异。作者不仅是向那些被称为达累斯萨拉姆大学“达累斯萨拉姆学派”的知识传统烙印的读者讲话；他们不仅关注受众（他们本身就是受众）的关注点，而且关注他们的优先事项和思想类别。本文对《发展作为反叛》进行了回顾，作为理论论证的证据，讨论读者如何塑造一篇文章的构图，以及这如何帮助我们解决关于非洲研究中的学术权威往往驻留在非洲之外的持续争论。 。解决这种情况必须反直觉地从关于非洲主义学术的受众而不是其作者的问题开始。