Animist poetics : ancestral trauma and regeneration in African literature / Ryan Topper.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Topper, Ryan, 1989- author.

Series:

SUNY series, philosophy and race.

SUNY series, philosophy and race series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

African literature--History and criticism.

African literature.

Animism--Africa.

Animism.

Animism in literature.

Postcolonialism--Africa.

Postcolonialism.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (x, 286 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Albany : State University of New York Press, 2025.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Ancestral Trauma and the Regenerative Death Drive

Animist Poetics' Realist-Ritual Spectrum: Aminatta Forna, Delia Jarrett-Macauley, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshai, Uhuru Portia Phalafala

Cosmic Personhood in the Animist Lyric: Reading Wole Soyinka's Prison Poetry with and against New Materialist Trauma Theory

Animist Tragedy's Biopolitical Mediation: Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman

Multidimensional Memory and the Architecture of Animism: Yvonne Vera's The Stone Virgins.

Notes:

Originally presented as the author's thesis (doctoral)--University of Leeds.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Other Format:

Print version:

ISBN:

9798855803266

OCLC:

1527588639