Melancholia Africana: The Indispensable Overcoming of the Black Condition(Creolizing the Canon)

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 resonates—loss 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.

Table of Contents:
Series Editors’ Note Foreword by Lewis R. Gordon Translator’s Note Author’s Introduction Part I: Melancholia Africana: Scattered Fragments of Africa 1. Loss, Mourning, and Survival in Africa and the Diaspora 2. For a Diasporic Consciousness 3. At the end of daybreak… the strength to see tomorrow 4. Pain that Sings the Happiness to Come Part II: How Does One Make Sense of Postcolonial Nonsense? 1. Scarlet Dawns of a Memory of Forgetting 2. From Death to Life in the Country of a Thousand Hills 3. From the Gaze of the Other to Self-Reflection 4. “On va faire comment ?”: Fact of Language, Civic Renunciation, or Theodicy of the Everyday in the Postcolony 5. Coda Epilogue: An Interview with Nathalie Etoke conducted by LaRose T. Parris (2019)

About the Author :
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 master’s degrees in French from Middlebury College and in Literary Theory from the École Normale Supérieure.

Review :
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. Existential Francophone theorist Nathalie Etoke introduces us, through a fine approach not only to her history, but also to the story of an “Us.” Through her wounds/words, Etoke destabilizes the limits that have been imposed on that “Us.” How to overcome that initial catastrophe for which African descendants still pay? How to understand and take responsibility of the irreparable in order to create another world, another humanity? ... This book is solidly written, and it can be used for research that ranges from Africana existential thought and critical theory to literary theory. The book achieves, in short, one of the main goals of the series editors—Jane A. Gordon and Neil Roberts—to which this book belongs, Creolizing the Canon, namely, to blur and also transcend the borders of the seemingly impossible.