Postcolonial psychoanalytic discourse has previously posited the condition of the native as one of interpellated neurosis (Sartre, 1963; Fanon, 1963; Hill, 1995). Using literary fiction emerging from a decolonised African continent, this dissertation endeavours to scrutinise the social, and consequently psychosomatic, pathology of such a diagnosis and its persistence as presented in African literary narratives on mental illness. Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988) is examined for its presentation of psychological practices of colonial, and equally patriarchal, refusal, which opens up countless theoretic perspectives on the intersections of postcoloniality, identity politics and the gendered experience. In this first chapter, Dangarembga’s novel is read alongside the psychoanalytic theory of Frantz Fanon – in line with numerous other critics who have identified the dialogue between the work of the latter and Nervous Conditions – in order to simultaneously contextualise and probe the nature of the native as nervous. Leading on from this, the second chapter considers a more contemporary contribution to the conversation of native psychology. Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater (2018), in which queerness and psychosis intermingle within the mind of the novel’s native-Nigerian protagonist, applies an understanding of indigenous Igbo systems of knowledge to its presentation of gender and illness. A principal research aim in using Emezi’s narrative is to point out the act of continual decolonisation of the psychological “native” within African literature.

University of Edinburgh, 2021

The work of Pauline Hopkins has undergone various multivalent scholarly readings, particularly in the current century, notwithstanding the relative sparsity of the author’s published voice in the years after her departure from the periodical Colored American Magazine (CAM) in 1904. While her first novel, Contending Forces (1900), has likely received the most attention, it is with her final fictional publication, Of One Blood; Or, The Hidden Self, serialised between 1902 and 1903, that this essay concerns itself.

University of Edinburgh, 2021

This chapter reports on a small-scale investigation into the relationship between mindfulness meditation techniques and peer-to-peer dialogue in the context of undergraduate English Literature seminars. Over the course of the project, a group of second-year undergraduate Literature students spent a total of six hours learning non-therapeutic mindfulness meditation in extracurricular workshops which focused on techniques that can be used both in preparation for and during seminars. The chapter both indicates techniques for integrating mindful practices into teaching and aims to situate the role of mindfulness more broadly within the current state of higher education in the humanities. The research was conducted by a member of staff and a student at the University of Surrey and this chapter is co-authored by both student and staff researcher.

Palgrave Macmillan, 2020