Animist Poetics

Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature

Ryan Topper

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN: 9798855803273, 9798855803259
• eBook ISBN: 9798855803266
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Literary Criticism
• Index: 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: African Literature’s Animist Poetics
• Chapter 1 Ancestral Trauma and the Regenerative Death Drive: Toward an Animist Revision of Psychoanalysis
• Chapter 2 Animist Poetics’ Realism-Ritual Spectrum: Aminatta Forna, Delia Jarrett-Macauley, Oswald Mbuyiseni Mtshali, Uhuru Portia Phalafala
• Chapter 3 Cosmic Personhood in the Animist Lyric: Reading Wole Soyinka’s Prison Poetry with and against New Materialism
• Chapter 4 Animist Tragedy’s Biopolitical Mediation: Staging Human Sacrifice in Wole Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman
• Chapter 5 Multidimensional Memory: Environmental Wounds and the Architecture of Animism in Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins
• Conclusion: Principles of Animist Criticism
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover