Editor's Choice from What is Africa to Me Now?

Dave Gunning’s essay “Dissociation, Spirit Possession, and the Languages of Trauma in Some Recent African-British Novels” has been awarded Editor’s Choice of Research in African Literatures vol. 46.4, What is Africa to Me Now? and can now be read for free at JSTOR.

Dave Gunning explains: "In recent years we have become familiar with the ways in which novelists have made use of the symptoms of dissociative disorder to create and elaborate their narratives. Whether exploring the uncanny doubles of multiple personality, or the memory loss of fugue states, these stories speak of origins in repressed psychological trauma. Within some traditional African belief systems, however, such mental states may be more readily explained through notions of spirit possession, or the actions of a malevolent force. What happens then when writers who move between African and British locations, and whose novels to do the same, use these narrative devices? And what becomes of each of the explanatory frameworks when they do so?

"This article from Research in African Literatures looks at how recent novels by Aminatta Forna, Helen Oyeyemi, and Brian Chikwava manipulate the image of dissociative symptoms, and how, by doing so, they upset some of our received notions of how traumatic experience is rendered in fictional narrative."

Check out this article and the other excellent contributions in volume 46.4 of Research in African Literatures!