Animist Poetics

<p><b>Argues that African literature conceptualizes trauma and regeneration as a more-than-human process offering an animist revision of psychoanalysis.</b></p><p>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 <i>Animist Poetics</i> 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. <i>Animist Poetics</i> 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.</p>