Take a further 20% off almost everything | Free Shipping over $89 (Limited time only, T&Cs apply)
Track My Order
Help Centre
Likes
My Wish ListsLogin / Join
Booktopia
Australia's local bookstore
Get Free Shipping on orders over $89
Animist Poetics : Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature - Ryan Topper

Animist Poetics

Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature

By: Ryan Topper

eBook | 1 August 2025

At a Glance

eBook

RRP $58.57

$52.79

10%OFF

or 4 interest-free payments of $13.20 with

 or 

Instant Digital Delivery to your Kobo Reader App

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.

on

You Can Find This eBook In

Non-FictionLiterature, Poetry & PlaysHistory & Criticism of LiteratureGeneral Literary StudiesLiterary Studies from 1900 to CurrentPsychologyPsychological Theory, Systems, Schools of Thought & ViewpointsPsychoanalytical Theory & Freudian PsychologyPhilosophyHistory of Western PhilosophyWestern Philosophy

Other Editions and Formats

Paperback

Published: 2nd February 2026

View Product

More in History & Criticism of Literature

Growing Up Chicana/o - Bill Adler

eBOOK

Growing Up Chicana/o

eBook

$5.99

The Double-Daring Book for Girls - Andrea J. Buchanan

eBOOK

The Double-Daring Book for Girls

eBook

RRP $35.99

$28.81

20%
OFF
The Good Life According to Hemingway - A. E. Hotchner

eBOOK

The Good Life According to Hemingway

eBook

RRP $25.99

$20.89

20%
OFF

This product is categorised by