This book marks an important contribution to colonial and postcolonial studies in its clarification of the African discourse of consciousness and its far-reaching analyses of a literature of animism. It will be of great interest to scholars in many fields including literary and critical theory, philosophy, anthropology, politics and psychoanalysis.

This book marks an important contribution to colonial and postcolonial studies in its clarification of the African discourse of consciousness and its far-reaching analyses of a literature of animism. It will be of great interest to scholars in many fields including literary and critical theory, philosophy, anthropology, politics and psychoanalysis.

This book uses the conceptual framework of animism, the belief in the spiritual qualities of nonhuman matter, to analyze representations of trauma in postcolonial fiction from Nigeria and India. Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature initiates a conversation between contemporary trauma literatures of Nigeria and India on animism. As postcolonial nations move farther away from the event of decolonization in real time, the experience of trauma take place within and is generated by an increasingly precarious environment of resource scarcity, over-accelerated industrialization, and ecological crisis. These factors combine to create mixed environments marked by constantly changing interactions between human and nonhuman matter. Examining novels by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Jhumpa Lahiri, Nnedi Okorafor, and Arundhati Roy, the book considers how animist beliefs shape the aesthetic representation of trauma in postcolonial literature, paying special attention to complex metaphor and narrative structure. These literary texts challenge the conventional wisdom that working through trauma involves achieving physical and psychic integrity in a stable environment. Instead, a type of provisional but substantive healing emerges in an animist relationship between human trauma victims and nonhuman matter. In this context, animism becomes a pivotal way to reframe the process of working through trauma. Offering a rich framework for analyzing trauma in postcolonial literature, this book will be of interest to scholars of postcolonial literature, Nigerian literature and South Asian literature.

“[A] luminous tale of passion and betrayal” set in the post-colonial and civil war eras of Sierra Leone (The New York Times). Winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book As a decade of civil war and political unrest comes to a devastating close, three men must reconcile themselves to their own fate and the fate of their broken nation. For Elias Cole, this means reflecting on his time as a young scholar in 1969 and the affair that defined his life. For Adrian Lockheart, it means listening to Elias’s tale and following his own heart into a heated romance. For Elias’s doctor, Kai Mansaray, it’s desperately battling his nightmares by trying to heal his patients. As each man’s story becomes inexorably bound with the others’, they discover that they are connected not only by their shared heritage, pain, and shame, but also by one remarkable woman. The Memory of Love is a beautiful and ambitious exploration of the influence history can have on generations, and the shared cultural burdens that each of us inevitably face. “A soft-spoken story of brutality and endurance set in postwar Sierra Leone . . . Tragedy and its aftermath are affectingly, memorably evoked in this multistranded narrative from a significant talent.” —Kirkus Reviews

When Julia flies in to war-scarred Sierra Leone from London, she is apprehensive about seeing her Uncle Moses for the first time in twenty years. But nothing could have prepared her for her encounter with her eight-year-old cousin, Citizen, a former child soldier, and for the shocking truth of what he has done. Driven by a desire to understand Citizen, Julia takes the disturbed child into the 'bush'. There they meet other child soldiers, and a story-teller, Bemba G., who provides a safe haven for them all and strives to return them to childhood through play, love, story-telling and performance. As Julia gradually rediscovers Africa, the different generations of her family rediscover their bonds. And then Bemba G. directs the child soldiers in a version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, with powerful effect.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of Animism as a religion and a culture of the Nilotic peoples of the Upper River Nile in modern "Southern Sudan". It gives an account of how the animistic ritual performances of the divine chief-priests are strategies in conflict management and resolution. For centuries, the Nilotic peoples have been resisting changes to new religious identities and conservatively remained Animists. Their current interactions with the external world, however, have transformed their religious identities. At present, the Nilotics are Animist-Christians or Animist-Muslims. This does not mean that the converted Nilotics relinquish Animism and become completely assimilated to the new religious prophetic dogmas, instead, they develop compatible religious practices of Animism, Christianity and Islam. New Islamic fundamentalism in Sudan which is sweeping Africa into Islamic religious orthodoxy, where Sharia (Islamic law) is the law of the land, rejects this compatibility and categorises the Nilotics as "heathens" and "apostates". Such characterisation engenders opposing religious categories, with one side urging Sharia and the other for what this study calls "gradable" culture. Kuel Jok is a researcher at the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki. In Sudan, Jok obtained a degree in English Linguistics and Literature and diplomas in Philosophy and Translation. He also studied International Law in Egypt. In Europe, Jok acquired an MA in Sociology from the University of Joensuu, Finland and a PhD in the same field from the University of Helsinki, Finland.

"Situating literature and anthropology in mutual interrogation, Miller's...book actually performs what so many of us only call for. Nowhere have all the crucial issues been brought together with the sort of critical sophistication it displays."—Henry Louis Gates, Jr. ". . . a superb cross-disciplinary analysis."—Y. Mudimbe

Addressing the question of how neoliberal ideology has served to conflate the radical left with extremism, this book examines how the Arab left has asserted itself in the context of authoritarianism and Islamic extremism during and after the Arab uprisings. It examines how the Arab cultural left has offered a critique of the signifying practices of political hegemonies in the region and argues that though creative expression as constituted in the very language of the Arab uprisings, it has put forward its own alternatives Using a wide array of texts and sources, both Arab and non-Arab, the opening chapters of the book identify how ethical and radical values pertaining to sociality are co-opted by political leaders in the Middle East and turned into jargon. Later chapters outline resistance to this co-option through a poetics of inter-subjectivity that takes structures of feeling into account, ranging from disappointment, despair and distrust, to dignity, solidarity and reconfigured senses of the sacred. In showing how psychological and affective states relate to signifying practices, the book offers an original conceptual framework for differentiating 'radicalization' from the creative radicalism of the Arab avant-garde.

This book offers an original and informed critique of a widespread yet often misunderstood condition — nostalgia, a pervasive human emotion connecting people across national and historical as well as personal boundaries. Often seen as merely escapist, nostalgia also offers solace and self-understanding for those displaced by the larger movements of our time. Walder analyses the writings of some of those entangled in the aftermath of empire, tracing the hidden connections underlying their yearnings for a common identity and a homeland, and their struggles to recover their histories. Through a series of comparative reflections upon the representation in literary and related cultural forms of memory, he shows how admitting the past into the present through nostalgia enables former colonial or diasporic subjects to gain a deeper understanding of the networks of power within which they are caught in the modern world — and beyond which it may yet be possible to move. Considering authors as varied as V.S Naipaul, J.G. Ballard, Doris Lessing, W.G. Sebald, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as well as versions of ‘Bushman’ song, Walder pursues the often wayward, ambiguous paths of nostalgia as it has been represented beyond, but also within, Europe, so as to identify some of those processes of communal and individual experience that constitute the present and, by implication, the future.

This study considers cultural representations of "brown" people in Jamaica and England alongside the determinations of race by statute from the Abolition era onwards. Through close readings of contemporary fictions and "histories," Salih probes the extent to which colonial ideologies may have been underpinned by what might be called subject-constituting statutes, along with the potential for force and violence which necessarily undergird the law. The author explores the role legal and non-legal discourse plays in disciplining the brown body in pre- and post-Abolition colonial contexts, as well as how are other bodies and identities – e.g. black, white are discursively disciplined. Salih examines whether or not it’s possible to say that non-legal texts such as prose fictions are engaged in this kind of discursive disciplining, and more broadly, looks at what contemporary formulations of "mixed" identity owe to these legal or non-legal discursive formations. This study demonstrates the striking connections between historical and contemporary discourses of race and brownness and argues for a shift in the ways we think about, represent and discuss "mixed race" people.