Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature

Argues that African literature conceptualizes trauma and regeneration as a more-than-human process, offering an animist revision of psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalytic trauma theory largely disregards African perspectives. Postcolonial criticism often filters these perspectives through a secular humanist lens. Examining how African literature uses animism to address the traumas of colonization, Animist Poetics offers a new understanding of the postcolonial condition. From an animist viewpoint, the self is not an individual but rather a regenerative process linking the living, the dead, and their ecosystems. Looking at poetry, fiction, drama, and visual art-including archival manuscripts by Wole Soyinka and Yvonne Vera-Ryan Topper argues that African literature reinvents these Indigenous ecologies in uniquely modern ways. Animist Poetics takes Indigenous-and literary-knowledge seriously, rethinking the foundations of psychoanalysis and charting new theoretical paths in posthumanism, the environmental humanities, new materialism, biopolitics, and memory studies.