Animist Poetics

Argues that African literature conceptualizes trauma and regeneration as a more-than-human process, offering an animist revision of psychoanalysis.

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.

Ryan Topper is Associate Professor of English at Western Oregon University

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

"Ryan Topper has written an outstanding, field-defining book on trauma in African literature. Animist Poetics will serve as a model for reading foundational and new texts representing colonialism and its legacies, including the destruction of African ecologies." — Evan Mwangi, author of The Postcolonial Animal: African Literature and Posthuman Ethics

"A timely and significant contribution to trauma studies, African studies, and ecocriticism, Animist Poetics traces the dialectical relation between the imposition of colonial violence and the emergence of novel and expansive social and political formations. Through nuanced readings, Ryan Topper shows how African literature provincializes Eurocentric and anthropocentric models of trauma and expands the concept of the postcolonial polis, activating a cosmology that joins human and nonhuman agents of the past, present, and future." — Nicole M. Rizzuto, author of Insurgent Testimonies: Witnessing Colonial Trauma in Modern and Anglophone Literature