Postcolonial Hauntologies

Ayo A. Coly is an associate professor of comparative literature and African studies at Dartmouth College. She is the author of The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction1. The African Female Body: From Colonial Inscription to Postcolonial Conscription2. Haunted Silences: African Feminist Criticism and the Specter of Sarah Baartman3. Spectral Female Sexualities: The Politics of Sexual Pleasure in Women’s Literatures4. Subversive and Pedagogical Hauntologies: The Unclothed Female Body in Visual and Performance Arts5. Laying Specters to Rest? On Bringing Sarah Baartman Home    ConclusionNotesReferencesIndex

“Coly makes her points with minimal jargon, using numerous beautifully illustrated and carefully explained examples from literature, dress code debates, photography, videography, and performance art from all over sub-Saharan Africa. . . . Coly’s analyses of individual pieces are nuanced and sensitive to varied (and contentious) interpretive possibilities. The book will be of interest to scholars and students in African, African diaspora, postcolonial, performance, gender, queer, and sexuality studies.”-A. H. Koblitz, Choice “These wide-ranging examples from African women’s literature and visual and performance arts, and Ayo Coly’s extended analyses of them, copiously support her arguments concerning colonial images of African women’s bodies and sexuality, the concept of hauntology, and efforts to counter such postcolonial ‘ghosts’ from the past. Postcolonial Hauntologies is a thought-provoking and extremely well-researched work.”-Elisha Renne, author of Cloth That Does Not Die: The Meaning of Cloth in Bunu Social Life “This essential analysis of literature and art in a single African woman–centered study fills an urgent void. This is a book that breaks ‘the silences of African feminist criticism on the sexual female body.’ I don’t think there has been such important scholarship in African feminism since the works of OyÈwÙmÍ and Amadiume were written ten and twenty years ago, respectively. This rare and much-needed crossover study answers an important call by going beyond literature to incorporate comparative studies of the arts at the same time.”-Cheryl Toman, author of Women Writers of Gabon: Literature and Herstory