Insidious Trauma in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures

This book investigates the thematic and conceptual dimensions of insidious trauma in contemporary eastern African literatures and cultural productions.

The book extends our understanding of trauma beyond people’s immediate and conventional experiences of disastrous events and incidents, instead considering how trauma is sustained in the aftermaths, continuing to impact livelihoods, and familial, social, and gender relationships. Drawing on different circumstances and experiences across and between the eastern African region, the book explores how emerging cultural practices involve varying modes of narrating, representing, and thematising insidious trauma. In doing so, the book considers different forms and practices of cultural production, including fashion, social media, film, and literature, in order to uncover how human subjects and cultural artefacts circulate through modalities of social, cultural and political ecologies.

Transdisciplinary in scope and showcasing the work of experts from across the region, this book will be an important guide for researchers across literature, media studies, sociology, and trauma studies.

Norman Saadi Nikro has Australian and Lebanese backgrounds, and since 2007 resides in Berlin, where he is a Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, and Privatdozent in the Department of English Literature and Cultural Studies at Potsdam University. From 2001 to 2007 he was Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at Notre Dame University in Lebanon. Over the past decade he has researched memory and trauma in literature and cultural production in Lebanon. His publications include The Fragmenting Force of Memory: Self, Literary Style, and Civil War in Lebanon (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2012); Milieus of ReMemory: Relationalities of Violence, Trauma, and Voice (Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2019); ＂Researching Trauma: Some Methodological Considerations for the Humanities,＂ Middle East Topics and Arguments, Vol. 11, 2018, 17-29. He edited the special issue ＂Situating Postcolonial Trauma Studies,＂ Postcolonial Text, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2014; and is co-editor of The Social Life of Memory: Violence, Trauma, and Testimony in Lebanon and Morocco (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). His book Nafsiyya: Edward Said’s Phenomenology of Racism is published with Palgrave Macmillan, in 2023.

Denish Odanga is a DAAD-PhD Fellow at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research is centred on the concept of ’Phobic Cosmopolitanisms, ’ where he explores tensions at the intersection between ’major’ and ’minor’ cosmopolitanisms within Anglophone literature and cultures. He has interests in the representations of trauma in the literary and cultural productions of eastern Africa, and studying forced migrations both within and beyond the African continent.

James Odhiambo Ogone is a senior lecturer in the Department of Languages, Literary, and Communication Studies at Jaramogi Oginga Odinga University of Science and Technology, Kenya. He obtained his PhD in Anglophone Literatures and Cultures from the University of Potsdam, Germany, in 2015. Since 2016, Ogone teaches Literary and Cultural Studies and has made significant scholarly contributions. He is a co-editor of Emerging Trends in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures, Galda Verlag, Berlin, 2020. His other recent publications include ＂Representational Epistemic Injustice: Disavowing the ’Other’ Africa in the Imaginative Geographies of Western Animation Films＂ (Colvin & Galasso, 2023) and ＂Nuanced Domestication of Social Media: Intrigues of Situated Cultural Affordances in Kenyan Local Ecologies of Knowledge＂ (Harmann, 2023). Ogone’s current research interests are in the fields of digital technologies and cultural production in Africa, popular culture, and East African literature.

Oduor Obura is a Kenyan and currently serves as a lecturer at the Technical University of Kenya, Nairobi. He holds a PhD from the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research interest includes the cultures and literatures of eastern Africa and anglophone modernities, and decolonial cosmopolitan themes focusing on aesthetics and politics of culture in eastern Africa. In his free time he writes plays, short stories and poetry (all not yet published). His publications include Decolonising Childhoods in Eastern Africa: Literary and Cultural Representations (Routledge, London, 2022) and Emerging Trends in Eastern African Literatures and Cultures (co-editor), Galda Verlag, Berlin, 2020.

Obala Musumba is a Lecturer of Comparative Literature at Bomet University College, Kenya. He holds a PhD in African Literature from Humboldt University of Berlin in Germany, from July 2020. His current research interest revolves around the reconstruction of subjectivities with albinism in Kiswahili fiction. His latest publication is a book entitled, ’Emergents’ of Violence: Nuruddin Farah’s Representation of the Child in Conflict Zones published in LuKA series by WVT Verlag (2023). Others include ＂Review of Takadini,＂ Journal of Eastern African Literary and Cultural Studies (JEALCS), Vol. 8, 2021, 202-203; and Emerging Trends in Eastern African Literature and Cultures. Glienicke: Galda Verlag (2020) (co-edited).