Description: Argues that African literature conceptualizes trauma and regeneration as a more-than-human process, offering an animist revision of psychoanalysis.
Brief description: Ryan Topper is Associate Professor of English at Western Oregon University
Review Quotes:
"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