Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition

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Description

Melancholia Africana argues that in the African and Afro-diasporic context, melancholy is rooted in collective experiences such as slavery, colonization, and the post-colony. From these experiences a theme of loss resonatesloss of land, of freedom, of language, of culture, of self, and of ideals born from independence. Nathalie Etoke demonstrates that, beyond territorial expropriation and the pain inflicted upon the body and the soul, the violence that seals the encounter with the other annihilates an age-old cycle of life. In the wake of this annihilation, continental and diasporic Africans strive to reconcile that which has been destroyed with what has been newly introduced. Their survival depends on their capacity to negotiate the inherent tension of their historical becoming. The book develops a transdisciplinary method encompassing historicism, critical theory, Africana existential thought, and poetics.

Reviews

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. -- Sam O. Imbo, Professor of Philosophy, Hamline University

Author Bio

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 masters degrees in French from Middlebury College and in Literary Theory from the cole Normale Suprieure.