History, Trauma, and Healing in Postcolonial Narratives

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

• 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

"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