Animist Poetics

Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature

von Ryan Topper

298 Seiten, Hardcover

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

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.

• Reihe: SUNY series, Philosophy and Race
• Themen: Biographie, Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft Geschichte und Kritik
• ISBN: 9798855803259
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 01.08.2025
• Größe: 235 x 157 mm
• Verlag: SUNY Press