Trauma Theory and Childhoods in African Fiction

This monograph project intervenes in the timely debate around the ‘decolonisation’ of trauma theory by providing a revised understanding of the theory’s Euro-American foundations primarily dominated by Freudian psychoanalysis and northern scholarship on the issue of difference. In so doing, I not only critique the foundational scholarship, but also suggest ways of expanding the foundations of the scholarship by proposing possible ways of rendering it multi-cultural. On the one hand, I argue that we should use fiction to retheorise trauma, rather then merely relying on narrative forms explicitly labelled as ‘theory’. On the other hand, I exploit the primary figure of psychoanalysis, the child, to reimagine what childhoods mean in the African context. In so doing, I lean into the inherent irony of children’s misperceptions of historical and socio-political circumstances that limit their understanding of atrocity and their positionalities within post-conflict societies.