History, Trauma, and Healing in Postcolonial Narratives

Ogaga Ifowodo is an assistant professor of English at Texas State University

"Ogaga Ifowodo's book is boldly ambitious in coverage and outstanding in theoretical and scholarly density. There is no question about it: this is a major contribution to African diaspora postcolonial literary and cultural studies." - Tejumola Olaniyan, Louise Durham Mead Professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

• Introduction 1. 'Into the Zone of Occult Instability': Frantz Fanon, Post-Colonial Trauma and Identity 2. Identity or Death! The Trauma of Life and Continuity in Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman 3. Experience as the Best Teacher: Trauma, Reference and Realism in Toni Morrison's Beloved 4. Trauma and Experience: LaCapra's Caveat to Realists 5. Trauma and Literary Theory 6. 'But How Will You Know Me?' Trauma, Memory and Meaning 7. Reference as Epistemic Access: Trauma's Horizon of Meaning 8. Conclusion: Specifying Morrison's Locus of Referentiality 9. 'Till the Word and the Wound Fit': History, Memory, and Healing of the Post-Colonial Body-Politic in Derek Walcott's Omeros 10. A Free-Floating Wound? Hybridity, Social Complexity and Identity 11. 'You all see what it's like without roots in this world?'Acting-Out and Working-Through Trauma 12. 'I Felt Every Wound Pass': From African Babble through Greek Manure to a Language that Carries its Cure 13. Conclusion: Reading Postcolonial History as a History of Trauma