ANIMIST POETICS : ANCESTRAL TRAUMA AND R

TOPPER, RYAN

ISBN 13: 9798855803273

Published by State University of New York Press, 2026

About this Item

Seller Inventory # NW9798855803273

Bibliographic Details

• Title: ANIMIST POETICS : ANCESTRAL TRAUMA AND R
• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication Date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798855803273
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: NEW

About this title

Synopsis

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.

About the Author

Ryan Topper is Associate Professor of English at Western Oregon University and Research Fellow in English at Stellenbosch University.