Conversations in Atlantic Theory • Jay Rajiva on Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature

'A discussion with Jay Rajiva, who teaches in the Department of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. He has published widely in anglophone postcolonial literary studies, focusing on South Asia and English language works from sub-Saharan Africa. Rajiva authored the 2017 work Postcolonial Parabola: Literature, Tactility, and the Ethics of Representing of Trauma, published by Bloomsbury Press, and is the author of Toward an Animist Reading of Postcolonial Trauma Literature, published in 2020 by Routledge, the occasion for our conversation today. In this conversation, we discuss the fecundity of animism as an interpretative frame, the ongoing relevance of traumatic memory in a range of postcolonial literatures, narrative and the complexity of representation, and the nature and promise of comparative, intertextual study.'