Nathalie Etoke is Associate Professor of Francophone and Africana Studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Bill Hamlett is a translator, researcher, and teacher of French. He holds master’s degrees in French from Middlebury College and in Literary Theory from the École Normale Supérieure.

• Series Editors’ NoteForeword by Lewis R. GordonTranslator’s NoteAuthor’s IntroductionPart I: Melancholia Africana: Scattered Fragments of Africa1. Loss, Mourning, and Survival in Africa and the Diaspora2. For a Diasporic Consciousness3. At the end of daybreak… the strength to see tomorrow4. Pain that Sings the Happiness to ComePart II: How Does One Make Sense of Postcolonial Nonsense?1. Scarlet Dawns of a Memory of Forgetting2. From Death to Life in the Country of a Thousand Hills3. From the Gaze of the Other to Self-Reflection4. “On va faire comment ?”: Fact of Language, Civic Renunciation, or Theodicy of the Everyday in the Postcolony 5. CodaEpilogue: An Interview with Nathalie Etoke conducted by LaRose T. Parris (2019)

Melancholia Africana is a journey inward and outward, between memory and forgetting, facing the psychic horrors to the Africana soul by the chaos of globalization by default. Nathalie Etoke dialectically connects Goree Island and Chicago, Elmina and Birmingham, Duala and Fort-de-France. Diasporic solidarity requires creativity for/giving and re-membering. Etoke invokes a diverse chorus including Fanon, Du Bois, Nina Simone and John Coltrane.