ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the African moral imagination as expressed by its creative writers and artists offers a fresh perspective on the experience of trauma and on the possibility for post-traumatic healing. While the field of trauma studies has not always embraced postcolonial perspectives, postcolonial writers have always embraced the problems of trauma, albeit in their own particular terms. Rather than engaging ideas from Freud, deconstruction, or the example of the Holocaust, African writers describe their experience in terms that grow out of their own lived sociocultural experience and history. By way of example, this chapter suggests how African experience allows us to reimagine the archetypal trauma story of Tancred and Clorinda, from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem. It also suggests how Africa’s experience of modernism offers a way to reconsider the links between trauma and modernity.
