Description: Melancholia Africana argues that in the African and Afro-diasporic context, melancholy is rooted in collective experiences such as slavery, colonization, and the post-colony.
Brief description: Nathalie Etoke is Associate Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the author of L'Écriture du corps féminin dans la littérature de l'Afrique francophone au sud du Sahara and Melancholia Africana l'indispensable dépassement de la condition noire (2010), which won the 2012 Frantz Fanon Prize awarded by the Caribbean Philosophical Association. In 2011, she directed Afro Diasporic French Identities, a documentary on race, identity and citizenship in contemporary France.
Review Quotes:
"Melancholia Africana is a journey inward and outward, between memory and forgetting, facing the psychic horrors to the Africana soul by the chaos of globalization by default. Nathalie Etoke dialectically connects Goree Island and Chicago, Elmina and Birmingham, Duala and Fort-de-France. Diasporic solidarity requires creativity for/giving and re-membering. Etoke invokes a diverse chorus including Fanon, Du Bois, Nina Simone and John Coltrane." --Sam O. Imbo, Professor of Philosophy, Hamline University
"Existential Francophone theorist Nathalie Etoke introduces us, through a fine approach not only to her history, but also to the story of an "Us." Through her wounds/words, Etoke destabilizes the limits that have been imposed on that "Us." How to overcome that initial catastrophe for which African descendants still pay? How to understand and take responsibility of the irreparable in order to create another world, another humanity? ... This book is solidly written, and it can be used for research that ranges from Africana existential thought and critical theory to literary theory. The book achieves, in short, one of the main goals of the series editors--Jane A. Gordon and Neil Roberts--to which this book belongs, Creolizing the Canon, namely, to blur and also transcend the borders of the seemingly impossible." --Black Issues in Philosophy, Blog of the APA