African Literature, Animism and Politics

This book considers ways in which inventions of Africa differ from inventions of the Orient. It identifies debates over the status of African thought as constituting one of the main preoccupations of a certain Africanist discourse. Here, Africa has been repeatedly construed as both unthinking and unthinkable. This book sets itself up against this tradition in re-addressing questions of animism, hybridity, and fetishism, and in attending to a writing Africa, an Africa that invents itself.

Caroline Rooney is Lecturer in English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent.