Postcolonial Literature’s Generative Capacities: A Conversation with Rose Casey and Ryan Topper

June 22, 2026

Postcolonial Literature’s Generative Capacities: A Conversation with Rose Casey and Ryan Topper

This dialogue is based on a conversation between Rose Casey and Ryan Topper about their recently published monographs:
Rose Casey, Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style. New York: Fordham University Press, 2025.
Ryan Topper, Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature. Albany: SUNY Press, 2025.

Reading each other’s books, they were struck by the philosophical unity between their projects, despite the fact that they approach postcolonial studies from very different angles. In this conversation, they use this common ground as a springboard to reflect on the current state of literary criticism and critical theory more broadly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rose Casey: When you proposed this dialogue, Ryan, I thought that our conversation would be valuable for our shared interest in African literature and postcolonial theory, but what’s emerged is a similar commitment to theorizing literature as generative: to recognizing what literature makes more so than what it critiques. We’re getting to this question and answer in quite different ways—you’re particularly interested in psychoanalysis and African literature, whereas I’m examining law and postcolonial anglophone literature—but this shared interest strikes me as both notable and unusual. I wonder if you could briefly share how you see African literature, in particular, as generating new ways of understanding the world? And I wonder: how might your argument be generalized beyond African literary studies?

Ryan Topper: Well, my opening gambit in Animist Poetics is that African literature offers cultural theory a way of understanding the trauma of colonialism as a more-than-human wound shaping both the living and the dead, and their shared ecosystems. What I describe as ancestral trauma is the postcolonial subject’s inheritance of this wound, their severance from a sense of co-animacy with the world. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno call this severance European modernity’s “extirpation of animism,”[1] and Sigmund Freud (among others) aligns it with the development of monotheistic theology. African literature goes further than any theorist I’ve found, though, in that it develops a strategy of regenerating this wrecked connection between the living and dead as well as the human and nonhuman, a connection central to so many Indigenous knowledge systems. Through its recuperation of animist logics, African literature gives us a theory of trauma that is explicitly posthumanist, postsecular, and ecopoetic (to be clear, though, these terms assume secular humanism as a starting point to be critiqued, which is to say they are terms that help Euro-American critics appreciate animism, not terms intrinsic to animist cosmologies). But perhaps more importantly, African literature also dialectically imagines a renewed co-animacy between the postcolonial subject and the world; it responds to animism’s extirpation by regenerating its wounded cosmological coordinates. As you put it, Rose, this literature critiques, but it also makes something in response.

This generative capacity is where I think African literature is especially fruitful for cultural criticism writ large, and thus where my argument can be generalized beyond African studies. If we begin the work of theory from an animist cosmology, how might we revise our understandings of ecology, cultural memory, or political community? How might discourses such as biopolitics, postcolonial studies, Black studies, or the environmental humanities become animist? These are the sorts of questions I ask throughout the book, and in order to answer them we have to move a step beyond critiquing the Cartesian subject and attempt to theorize a more expansive subjective form. By restoring the colonized subject to an ecological and even cosmological expanse, thereby regenerating the more-than-human, nonlinear modes of kinship colonialism sought to destroy, African literature is already doing this theoretical work. My goal in Animist Poetics is to teach us how to read and recognize this work.

In a nutshell, then, African literature offers us a way of understanding cultural trauma and regeneration that operates beyond the latent secular humanism undergirding so much of contemporary theory. But to track with this new understanding, we have to reorient our inherited notions of subjectivity through animism. Once we start conceiving of an animist form of subjectivity, a subject reunited with the rest of nature, we can really start recognizing how African literature reframes so much of contemporary theory and criticism. So while my philosophical starting point is an animist revision of psychoanalytic theory, the book quickly moves via animism to address theory at large, with the goal of modeling a practice of animist criticism that might resonate far beyond our shared interest in postcolonial literature.

Already, there are so many points of connection between what I’ve just explained and your project, Rose. On the one hand, we are both analyzing how colonialism created previously unknown borders between people and environments, and we both trace how postcolonial literature imaginatively reconnects people to these environments. On the other, I primarily read this process in terms of the structure of subjectivity, while you read it in the context of the history of law. I’m wondering what is at stake in these different focalizations. Could you briefly explain why the historical development of English property law is key to the human and nonhuman ruptures we are both analyzing?

RC: Thank you for outlining your book and its major interventions so clearly, Ryan. I love how Animist Poetics puts animist criticism into practice, not least because your argument that African literature theorizes an ecological subjectivity will no doubt be transformative for the environmental humanities far beyond postcolonial studies, as well as for the theoretical humanities more broadly.

As to your question, the proprietary logic that I’m identifying across English-derived legal systems is distinctly colonial. European colonial domination was made thinkable by a set of historically specific ideas about property ownership and its capacity for alienation; these ideas underpin the processes of appropriation, extraction, accumulation, dispossession, and exclusion that mark political modernity, or what we might, more accurately, term the long period of colonial racial capitalism. This proprietary logic is similar to, but not quite the same as, the possessive logic that theorists since C.B. Macpherson have ascribed to political modernity, including the form of subjectivity that has come to dominate this period, as Judith Butler and Aileen Moreton-Robinson have both shown. The term proprietary is distinctly legal, in that it became entrenched through ideas about property ownership that were always enforced through the law. English property law facilitated land theft, resource extraction, and racialized dispossession on a global scale by cementing a proprietary relationship between land and people. As legal theorists of colonial racial capitalism, especially in Black studies and Indigenous studies—people like Cheryl Harris, Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Colin Dayan, Stephen Best, and Brenna Bhandar—have shown, property is always racialized, especially in the negation of legal personality that was one of chattel slavery’s central mechanisms. Recent postcolonial scholarship in law and the humanities has built brilliantly upon this work: we might think of Angela Naimou’s work on legal personality in U.S. and Caribbean literary and cultural forms;[2] Renisa Mawani on legal personality and maritime law in the English empire;[3] Joseph Slaughter on intellectual property law in the Global South;[4] and Leila Neti on inheritance laws in India.[5] So, the individuated logic that you correctly identify as shaping colonial subjectivity emerges at the same time as, and partly as a result of, the proprietary logics of English property law.

You asked how and why is all of this important to theorizing human and nonhuman ruptures. Well, proprietary logic, in affirming alienable ownership in order to facilitate acquisition and accumulation, is formally structured upon the topos of enclosure. The very process of colonial expansion was prompted, in part, by philosophies of ownership that served to enclose land, labor, and resources in order to extract and accumulate wealth. But it wasn’t just ideas about ownership that facilitated racialized forms of dispossession; it was, more specifically, how these ideas were put into practice through the imposition of colonial law. The framework of the proprietary productively illuminates the extent to which property law has been used to conceptualize, implement, and justify colonial regimes, and this framework likewise recognizes that colonial legal systems continue to shape the postcolonial present. All of this is quite depressing and speaks to the ways that large-scale systems become entrenched; in this way, my analysis corresponds closely to your argument, Ryan, that African literature draws attention to, and responds to, animism’s extirpation. Much like your own account of African literature’s theoretical work, my book argues that postcolonial writers as well as postcolonial legal actors and activists are productively responding to proprietary property laws by using methods that I describe as improper.

This term, impropriety, names an aesthetic characteristic of experimental postcolonial literature while also functioning as an analytically generative framework for reconfiguring postcolonial property laws and the forms of sociopolitical relation that they themselves produce. There is a deconstructive element here that we can go into more later—I’m aware that this answer is already getting long—but for the purposes of setting out terms and stakes, let me say that impropriety, as I theorize it in this book, is not a contrarian impulse but instead operates specifically to counteract English-derived property law’s proprietary logic. Impropriety derives from the Latin improprius, being a negative inflection of the Latin proprius, meaning already of oneself. As such, the term etymologically indexes that which is outside the borders of one’s own being. Whereas the proprietary is based on the topos of enclosure, the improper refuses that very possibility. Impropriety might be the only way out of the totalizing system of proprietary relationships to land and people that has been implemented and globalized under colonial racial capitalism, particularly through the apparatus and logics of English property law.

Now, you asked what’s at stake in our different focalizations of subjectivity, on the one hand, and law on the other. I would suggest that looking at the law as a system, and at English property law as a globalized set of legal rules and assumptions, clarifies the scale of the problem at hand. Subjectivity is one part of that bigger system. And this isn’t to say that subjectivity is less important an area of analysis than the law, or that the question of subjectivity is in any way small! Reading our books together at once expands the scope of this problem we’re both tackling—of colonialism’s ongoing harms—and narrows our focus to how the problem might be countered. And what we’re both suggesting is that postcolonial writers, among others, are theorizing and implementing non-proprietary modes of being that reject colonial suppositions and are improper, in my terms, and animist, in yours. What do you think? How does your account of animist subjectivity correspond to what I’ve just laid out?

RT: Wow, I love where we’re going with this conversation! Your argument makes a lot of sense to me and corresponds with my take on animist subjectivity. The proprietary legal logic you critique emerges alongside the individuated, linear, anthropocentric subject that I critique. You anchor proprietary thinking, which is structural, to English property law, which is historical. On the one hand, I likewise contextualize the sovereignly bordered subject as a product of colonialism’s material practices (prison development, to name one example). On the other, I anchor this historical trajectory to a structural concept: monotheistic theology’s extraction of divinity out of the earth and abstraction of God as a wholly other being. The shift from animism to monotheism is not just a rejection of polytheism, but more fundamentally a shift from a world of terrestrial gods, and thus natural spirituality, to a world in which God reigns sovereign over nature—and “man” exists in His image. Animism therefore has a lot to bring to the table for scholars in Black studies invested in Sylvia Wynter’s critique of “Man” as a theological construct. To stick to my point, though, while we might be analyzing different concepts in different sets of texts, these overlaps—between proprietary law and a secularized theological subject, as well as between structural and material concerns—emphasizes the mass scale of colonialism’s effects on the world.

I also think there are so many philosophical overlaps to be noted between your take on impropriety and my take on animism, even if impropriety names for you a mode of legal thought and animism names for me a mode of cosmological thought. Improper logic bursts out of the enclosures that, through colonial law, materially and epistemologically separate people and environments into bounded, proper locations. So impropriety, like animism, refuses colonialism’s rage for order and offers us a way to think about the self and the world in more expansive, relational terms. In this way we could blend our lexicons to say that animism is an improper cosmology producing subjective coordinates that cannot be pinned down by colonialism’s proprietary logic.

I’m now thinking about the fact that the literature I analyze throughout Animist Poetics all responds to specific colonial legal conditions. Yvonne Vera pits her practice of animist poetics against a long history of Rhodesian and Zimbabwean land laws, for instance. And in your book, you identify impropriety in some explicitly animist texts—Ben Okri’s and Chigozie Obioma’s fiction and M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry, for example, which I think together exemplify quite well the realism-ritual spectrum of animist poetics I describe in my book. These points of connection suggest to me that animist cosmologies can be codified into legal practices to produce more equitable relations in the world, and also that a legal practice of impropriety might assume an animist form of subjectivity as it thinks beyond proprietary bounds. There’s so much back-and-forth between impropriety and animism as well as the material and structural aftereffects of colonialism that we could discuss. To return to your question, though, subjectivity is such a focal point of my book because I am asking how animism might reshape the practice of theory, which since the rise of poststructuralism has been predicated on a critique of the “sovereign subject.” But I think your book demonstrates very clearly that this subject is part of a larger ideological system. And one point my book is trying to make is that this subject is not the one-and-only subject.

RC: Yes! I noticed precisely this while reading your book: that so many of the literary works you analyze through the framework of animist poetics likewise assess colonial and postcolonial legal conditions. Of course, this interest in the law is common in postcolonial literature, not least because law, in general, is slow to change, so daily life in the postcolonial state continues to be structured, to a certain extent, by colonial legal systems and the philosophical beliefs on which those systems are based. Wole Soyinka’s prison poetry, which you discuss brilliantly in relation to new materialism, is, of course, deeply concerned with the law; similarly, through your biopolitical framing of Soyinka’s famous play, Death and the King’s Horseman, you assess the tragic impact of colonial Britain’s failure to recognize Yoruba law as jurisprudence rather than cultural practice. And you’re right: animist cosmologies can be, and are being, codified in law. We see this in South Africa, where the proprietary tenets of intellectual property law have been significantly reworked in the Indigenous Knowledge Act (2019) to recognize non-proprietary forms of creative work and knowledge production. This new law was passed after decades of concerted work by Indigenous peoples and legal activists to recognize that globalized intellectual property (IP) law is facilitating large-scale theft of Indigenous knowledge and culture. Broadly, the argument is that IP law follows European ideas about proprietary property ownership in its requirement that any form of knowledge, or any cultural practice or work of art, needs to be original, identifiable as the product of a sole author or named authors, and recorded in permanent form. By contrast, Indigenous processes of knowledge production and creative expression tend to develop orally or ephemerally; they tend to affirm collaboration between people and over time; and they appreciate the passing on of ideas and art rather than demanding originality. So, South Africa’s Indigenous Knowledge Act, like similar initiatives in various jurisdictions across the world, upholds broadly animist principles. As you put it just now, animist cosmologies can be codified into legal practices to produce more equitable relations in the world.

I absolutely agree that my account of impropriety operates in very similar ways to the animist cosmologies that you identify in your readings of contemporary African literature. As you just reiterated, your book makes animist theories of subjectivity visible, and it does this as a way to at once grapple with colonialism’s ongoing material and structural impact, and to reinvent animist modes of living in the world. (And you insist that African writers are reinventing animist cosmologies and associated forms of subjectivity, not recovering them—this point is worth emphasizing and perhaps worth revisiting.) Thinking about your book in this light, and as articulated in this conversation, makes me realize that my account of legal and aesthetic impropriety similarly necessitates engaging with the concept of subjectivity in both its ideational and material forms. Is an anticolonial form of subjectivity improper? And yes, it is: absolutely. In relation to the material discussed in my book, proprietary subjectivity’s colonial tenor is most obvious in the doctrine of legal personality and its racially exclusionary history. As many brilliant legal theorists have identified, and as I discuss in my reading of Philip’s epic poem Zong!, enslaved people of African descent were legally considered to lack legal personality. More precisely, their legal personality was retractable: they held it in some circumstances but lacked it in most, instead holding the legal status of chattel, or object. In English legal history, the question of a Black person’s legal personality was first parsed in seventeenth-century admiralty law: namely in the Navigation Acts and subsequent legal opinions.

So, the fact that this proprietary exclusion from legal personality was voided with abolition affirms your important claim that the sovereign subject is not the only type of subjectivity available or, indeed, operative in the world. But I wonder: isn’t the challenge to sovereign subjectivity, which you here ascribe to animism, at the heart of almost all schools of critical theory since at least the mid-twentieth century? What is an animist account of subjectivity doing differently than, say, Cathy Caruth in trauma theory, Roberto Esposito in political theory, or Judith Butler across their accounts of gender, sexuality, and phenomenology?

RT: Great question, Rose. Before I answer, let me first say I am fascinated by these connections between the improper and the animist: the transtemporal and transpersonal focus of the Indigenous Knowledge Act, the restoration of the dead into legal personality in Philip’s Zong!, or the paradigm shift toward a legal recognition of ecological symbiosis in literature of the Niger Delta. . . . Oh, and speaking of Zong!, your chapter is hands down the best piece of criticism on the poem I’ve read. It re-opened the text for me in ways I couldn’t foresee.

But to respond to your question, I think what you’re getting at is that Euro-American theory and postcolonial animism cannot be placed in opposition. Their shared conceptualization of collective subjectivity, which you’re pointing out, is a great example of why. At the same time, “applying” a theory by scholars like Caruth, Esposito, or Butler in order to interpret a postcolonial text can be such a stale, mechanical, and even patrimonial way of reading. I’m really exhausted by this mode of criticism, which basically says, Look, this text illustrates what this theorist already taught me! Like you, I’m more interested in comparatively analyzing literature and theory from different contexts, then thinking through the points of overlap, departure, or even productive agonism that emerges. I think this style of criticism allows us to see where animist subjectivity diverges from the norms of theorizing the subject in Euro-American academia.

If what we call subjectivity is, from an animist perspective, an ongoing cosmological process linking together the living and the dead, the human and the nonhuman, and the ecosystems within which these categories co-animate each other, then animism is a step ahead of deconstructive approaches to the subject. Caruth and Butler, for example, each theorize how trauma awakens us to the relational form of our subjectivity. We might think we are sovereignly bordered individuals, but our wounds teach us that we are “implicated” subjects in Caruth’s terms or “vulnerable” subjects in Butler’s. In other words, we are actually relational. But for animism, this point is an a priori, not something we need to awaken to recognize. The same goes for Esposito, whose work on personhood more closely aligns with your focus on legal history. Like Caruth and Butler, he’s trying to think beyond the philosophical coordinates of post-Enlightenment European thought, but the thing is . . . there are actually other traditions of thought in the world. Indigenous cosmologies do exist. There are ways of perceiving personhood that Esposito’s project does not consider, which is not really a fault of his, because a deconstructive approach to Western notions of personhood is an extremely important philosophical project. We are dealing with two traditions of theory emerging from different cosmological starting points—a deconstructive tradition that begins with the Eurocentric logic it is attempting to think beyond, and an animistic tradition that dialectically combats the mode of rationality that humanists have so helpfully critiqued since the rise of theory. Maybe the form of subjectivity that critics like Caruth, Butler, and Esposito are hoping for, that theory after deconstruction has been pointing toward as some radically other form, is present in animism.

RC: Right! I have tended to think of animism as incompatible with European theories of subjectivity precisely because it theorizes the fundamental interconnectedness of all life forms, while the European model that theorists like Butler and Esposito attempt to deconstruct is bounded and sovereign. Yet, as you suggest here and throughout your book, animist approaches to the world don’t negate subjectivity; they simply recognize it as exceeding the historically constructed figure of the bounded subject. As you say, there are other intellectual traditions in the world!

RT: Exactly. Many new materialists like to negate subjectivity through a type of pseudo-animism, but the animist logic I find in African literature is invested in postcolonial subject formation. It also helps to think of this relationship between Euro-American theory and postcolonial animism in terms of plot. Caruth and Butler, to return to your previous examples, tell us that traumatic wounds deconstruct our assumptions about subjectivity, exposing our psychic borders as constructs inherited from post-Enlightenment rationality. Their theories of wounded subjectivity therefore plot a theoretical movement from closed individuation to open relationality. Or, to reframe the plot a bit in your terms, these critics are trying to shift subjectivity from a logic of proprietary borders to an improper form. Ironically, the trauma of colonialism to which animist poetics responds plots subjectivity in the opposite direction. From an animist perspective, colonial trauma does not awaken us to our “implicated” or “vulnerable” condition (à la Caruth or Butler). It instead wrecks the coordinates of a subjectivity that is implicated with the world in the most expansive, more-than-human sense. So colonial trauma is individuating, shifting us away from open relationality. It makes us proper subjects, to blend our critical lexicons again. Now we’re provincializing critics like Caruth and Butler—not to claim that their theories are incompatible with postcolonial studies, but to recognize the cosmological starting point conditioning their thought, and how this starting point differs from Indigenous knowledge systems.

At the same time, part of my argument throughout Animist Poetics is that colonial modernity wrought so much damage to Indigenous cosmologies, economies, and ecosystems throughout the world that animist subjectivity in our era is experienced as wounded, as traumatized. This means we still need “European” theory, if that’s what we want to call it, because we’re never fully outside of Western metaphysics. So even though we should provincialize deconstructive approaches to subjectivity, as I’ve suggested, we shouldn’t throw them out.

This idea leads us back to the relationship I see between animism and trauma, which might be another way of tackling your question about subjectivity. As I see it, the fundamental task of animist poetics is to regenerate wrecked forms of collective subjectivity that exceed our secular, humanist logic and thus reconnect us to the world in ways that might surprise us. This means that, in our era, animism is a form of modernism, a mode of “making it new.” Animist cosmologies are not precolonial throwbacks; they emerge out of colonial modernity, which means they emerge from collective trauma. A lot of critics in postcolonial studies have moved on from the concept of trauma, so to speak, to focus on discourses such as the environmental humanities. But animist ecologies in our era are always responses to the environmental traumas of global capitalism. I don’t think there’s any way around this fact. So we can’t move on from the concept of trauma. Instead we need to rethink colonial trauma as the collective severance from a sense of co-animacy with the world. One way to think about this problem is to take seriously the relationship between the material and the spiritual. As Indigenous economies and ecosystems are mutilated, the perceived kinship between the living and the dead as well as the human and more-than-human world within the colonized subject also becomes mutilated. Hence my focus on ancestral trauma.

Yet, I’m not fully satisfied with a reconceived trauma theory. I think we need to pass through an animist theory of trauma in order to conceptualize the regenerative nature of animist poetics. Colonialism extirpates animism, but animist poetics regenerates in response. It’s modernism, and it’s dialectical. And this movement from colonial rupture to postcolonial renewal might be another point of dialogue between my book and yours, Rose. Proprietary logic has had such violent and totalizing effects on the world, and through the concept of impropriety you name a more just form of relationality that emerges in the wake of proprietary logic’s “topos of enclosure.” Do you view this argument as dialectical? And do you view impropriety as modernist? Or do these terms miss the mark? In a nutshell, how does your take on impropriety’s relationship to propriety map onto the schemas I’ve just laid out?

RC: Hm, interesting question. While I can see how my argument might be understood as dialectical, at least in its broad overview, I actually think that our projects diverge at precisely this point. My method is more indebted to deconstruction than dialectics, and I’m as wary of conceptualizing the system of colonial racial capitalism as a rupture to prior orders as I am of naming anticolonial efforts as renewal. The framework of impropriety is useful because it not only describes a common aesthetic across much postcolonial anglophone literature but it also gestures outside colonialism’s proprietary logics: a movement that is vital to ongoing processes of liberation and sovereignty. I mentioned earlier that the relationship between proprietariness and impropriety is akin to, but not the same as, the formulation of possession and dispossession. The latter pairing is unsatisfying because it locks us into critique: we can identify colonialism’s predication on possession, and we can critique the myriad forms of dispossession it thereby enabled, but then we are stuck. The proprietary/improper nexus instead allows for description, analysis, and creativity: a descriptive acknowledgement of colonialism’s proprietary tenets, an analytic opposition to them, and a generative theorizing of anticolonial modes of being in common. In other words, impropriety differentiates and displaces rather than contradicts; it’s generative because it’s not strictly in opposition to the violence of colonial possession, even as it confronts it.

In the legal contexts that I examine, impropriety references both a reciprocal relationship between people and land, and, at the same time, the aesthetic techniques that themselves register reciprocity. So, this concept of aesthetic impropriety functions much like Christina Sharpe’s concept of wake work, in that it offers both critique and affirmation. To adopt the critical posture of impropriety, as I suggest the selected literary works and legal instruments in my book do, is to at once confront English property law’s role in dispossession and work affirmatively toward the ongoing project of anticolonial liberation. There’s something deeply hopeful in this movement that opens up possession’s closed analytic loop; something that improperly refuses to stop at recognizing harms and instead works to articulate possible solutions.

In my book, impropriety is both an idea and a practice: both a structure of thought and a creative process. Similarly, the category of aesthetic impropriety references a kind of aesthetic experimentation that I identify across a range of postcolonial anglophone literary works, and it also indicates the aesthetic and compositional forms taken by improper, or anticolonial, ideas.

In other words, the category of aesthetic impropriety assumes that anticolonial literary innovations and emerging legal ideas share compositional logics. These logics are, perhaps, easier to see as compositional in aesthetic contexts, but they are also operative in legal contexts and can be identified in specific statutes, opinions, or instruments.

If I think about the most substantial conceptual relationship between our books, it’s this anticolonial view of the world as structured upon impropriety or animism. One of the things that I find so exciting about your book, Ryan, is that it offers a really compelling case for the relevance and usefulness of psychoanalysis for both literary studies and critical thought. In place of the individuated subject of psychoanalysis as typically rendered, you show how African literature “envisions subjectivity as endlessly relational.”[6] It’s precisely this endless relationality that’s at stake in my account of impropriety as both an aesthetic strategy and a legal and political disposition—one that might work toward an anticolonial present and future by undoing the proprietary thinking that enabled colonial rule and continues to structure our present. You’re also thinking about epistemological and material structures, and you’re doing so in a way that really clarifies why subjectivity remains a vital question for postcolonial studies. In animist philosophy as much as in psychoanalysis, subjectivity is at stake; the difference is that, where psychoanalysis has typically attempted to shore up the individual subject and their sense of self, animism offers a way to theorize subjectivity as at once cohering and converging. Unlike psychoanalysis as typically conceived, animism knows that opening up subjectivity is not to launch an attack upon it; instead, this process of dilation beyond the individual and the human is, in fact, the precondition for activating subjectivity. In this sense, your account of the subject as always already ecological and, indeed, extratemporal is fundamentally deconstructive.

RT: I love what you’re doing with deconstruction. And yes—if we’re talking about method, I think mine is also indebted to deconstruction, even if I conceptualize animism more as dialectical. That’s because I’m asking how theory, which is anchored to Western metaphysical coordinates (often because these coordinates are being critiqued), can learn from and be revised by animism. I’m now differentiating my object of my analysis—African literature’s animist poetics, which I interpret as dialectical—and my act of criticism, my attempt to sketch out a mode of theory based in animism that is relevant to our discipline. Even if I’m talking about a dialectical process, I need to think deconstructively to articulate, in the language of criticism, the stakes of this process. Does that make sense?

This deconstructive aspect helps explain why Freud ends up being a key thinker for Animist Poetics, even though he goes to great lengths to distance psychoanalysis from animism, associating the latter with children, so-called primitives, and neurotics. Actually, the main reason he bashes animism so much is that he is worried about the obvious proximity between psychoanalysis and animism intrinsic to his theories. We could talk about the magic of transference, or the fetish, or the posthumanist and postsecular logic intrinsic to Freud’s critique of the autonomous subject or his theories of the development of religion. These examples show us different layers of the repressed animism of psychoanalysis. We could also reconsider the language of possession in Jean Laplanche’s work, or Catherine Malabou’s attempt to posthumanize Freud, in light of animism. To put it as simply as I can, I think African literature gives us a lens through which to recognize an animistic mode of thought that has always been operative in psychoanalytic theory. And I think an anxiety about this animism is the main reason Freud tries so hard to cast psychoanalysis as a mode of post-Enlightenment secular rationality, even as he offers his harshest critiques of this rationality.

So part of my argument is that African literature offers us a way of reading psychoanalysis contrapuntally (to borrow Edward Said’s term), strategically drawing out its repressed animism. I see this interpretive move as building on Frantz Fanon’s “sociodiagnostic” critique of Freud, but from an animist perspective Fanon’s critique needs to be totalized so the “socio” includes the more-than-human world. This line of thinking leads to the concept of the regenerative death drive. In a nutshell, if we start with an animist theory of subjectivity, the death drive that Freud equates with stasis can actually be equated with regeneration; after all, the subject is environmental, not individual, and across the natural world death always generates new life. I don’t think I explicitly cast this argument as “deconstructive” in the book, but I do see it that way. I don’t place animism in opposition to psychoanalytic theory, but rather use the former to reread the latter, then use this rereading to sketch out a revised theory of the former. Of course, I don’t tether the book’s framework solely to psychoanalysis, but as I’ve mentioned previously, the violence of colonialism necessitates that we have some sort of trauma theory to begin to understand postcolonial forms of animism. Hence my use of psychoanalysis, or at least an “against the grain” reading of psychoanalysis, as a theoretical entry point to articulate animist approaches to biopolitics, ecocriticism, etc.

Now, maybe I’m having my cake and eating it too, but I do cast animist criticism, the method of reading I try to model throughout Animist Poetics, as dialectical. Animist criticism boils down to two hermeneutic steps: (a) read in strategic response to the cosmological wounding wrought by colonial modernity, and (b) aim this interpretive act toward the regeneration of the more-than-human, transtemporal kinship we’ve all lost (in extremely uneven ways) under the weight of the colonial legacies both of our books are critiquing. So animist criticism comes from what we might call a “close reading” of African literature, in the sense that this methodology aims to follow alongside and emulate the dialectic mode intrinsic to the animist poetics of this literature. Again, though, deconstructive thinking helps us critics in the Euro-American academy epistemologically catch up with animism’s dialectical mode. We have a lot of baggage, so we inevitably lag behind.

And so, all this is to say, Rose, I’m really captivated by the deconstructive element of impropriety you’re explaining, which likewise emerges from your close readings of anglophone law and literature. Could you unpack how this aspect of your argument relates to your critique of the more wishy-washy style of deconstruction? You really buck up against the utopian, ethical framework that has become associated with deconstruction, and instead embrace the fundamental usefulness of both law and literature. And I’m really drawn to this aspect of your book, too. I’m wondering if your take on impropriety as deconstructive but not messianic is related to your intervention in the new formalism? This is another layer of your book’s theoretical framing I find really important. I know I’m asking a lot here, Rose, but I think your focus on postcolonial literature’s generative capacities brings your deconstructive practice into dialogue with the new formalism in really exciting ways. Ultimately, you show us that literature can do more than lament. It can go beyond the work of mourning through a productive approach to aesthetics—which is a “beyond” I’m also trying to theorize via animism.

RC: I love the distinction you’re making between your object of analysis and your act of criticism, Ryan. The descriptive category and analytic concept of impropriety functions similarly to animism, as you articulate it here, in that it both usefully identifies commonalities in form and ideas across a wide set of literary and legal contexts and articulates a mode of theorizing that is helpful—perhaps vital—for literary studies and the critical humanities.

Your reading of Aminatta Forna and Delia Jarrett-Macauley demonstrates the stakes of this move: Forna’s The Memory of Love, for instance, offers a sensitive account of postcolonial trauma in Sierra Leone after the civil war of 1991–2002 and an incisive critique of the humanitarian-industrial complex. Yet, as you observe, Forna’s novel, like Jarrett-Macauley’s Moses, Citizen, and Me, remains stuck at critique. Each novel only “dreams of a world otherwise” and “the possibility of an alternative state emerging”; each can only imagine “a polis yet to come.”[7] And I want to pause for a moment to note that “imagining” is a common framing for theoretical accounts that attempt to move beyond critique, yet it’s deeply insufficient for articulating the mechanics and stakes of our projects, as it implies a detachment from the concrete material world; it suggests an attempt to think beyond that remains a step away from actively producing, building, or working towards.

Your book convincingly and meticulously demonstrates that African animist literature is actively involved in producing these anticolonial worlds: or, in your terms, in regenerating an animist cosmology. At one point, you identify as the locus of your analysis “the hydraulics of animist poetics,”[8] and this hydraulic metaphor beautifully sums up the process by which literary texts can shape and are shaping our present moment. The works that you analyze, from novels to poetry to drama, activate animist understandings of the world, in the sense that they bring that understanding into being. Your reading of Uhuru Portia Phalafala’s poetry collection Mine Mine Mine demonstrates this process very well (I just recommended your chapter to a graduate student who’s working on Phalafala—it’s so good), as do your readings of Wole Soyinka that follow. And crucially, as you note above, you go beyond analyzing what’s happening across African animist literature to theorize a productive mode of criticism: “the next step,” you write, “in a more fully animist criticism is to assume a more animistic approach to the literary itself.”[9] In one sense, you’re identifying a model of material interrelatedness that is akin to, but more robust than, that which is articulated by new materialists. And, in another, you’re arguing that African animist literature (and, notably, not scholarship about these works but the works themselves!) provides a valuable model for literary analysis writ large in that it emphasizes the theoretically and materially generative work of literature itself.

There are, of course, slight differences in how we build our respective cases for literature’s generative capacities (or regenerative, in your analysis), although there are, intriguingly, more similarities than not. We both recognize that works of literature are involved in a process of making and thinking, so we both prioritize literature as much as scholarship or theory as a site where thought is produced. For both of us, literature is at least as generative in its aesthetic form as it is in its plot or setting, meaning not only that attending to aesthetics is vital for any robust literary scholarship but also that literary works, as they are read and discussed, are exerting their own kind of force upon the world. And these shared presuppositions—about how literature produces new ideas and regenerates attenuated ways of thinking—lead us both to engage in cross-genre analysis. It is because these processes of production and reproduction occur, above all, aesthetically, that they can be identified across all literary genres and forms, including novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. This willingness and determination to cross genres is clear in both of our books, and it’s one of many aspects of Animist Poetics that I really appreciate.

My own account of literature’s capacity to generate rather than merely critique is absolutely connected to the relationship that I identify between law and literature; as you suggest, my version of the relationship between the two is distinct from the looser ethical connection that is often seen in scholarship in law and the humanities that is also informed by deconstruction. And yes, as you helpfully recognize, I build my analysis of this grounded, intertwined relationship between law and literature by taking a deconstructive approach to the kinds of aesthetic or stylistic questions that are explored by the new formalists. It’s helpful, I find, to think about literary stylistic features not just in terms of form, even as I’m convinced by Caroline Levine’s argument that literary forms correspond to social forms, and I’m convinced, too, by Anna Kornbluh’s argument that form is enabling: that forms are built and also build, and that we can construct, in literature and in literary analysis, the kinds of forms that generate, in their social contexts, more egalitarian, sustainable, fulfilling modes of life. Yet, form is, in some ways, a limiting category, for two reasons: first, it’s typically understood as constructed and controlled, while my account of the aesthetic acknowledges that the compositional relationships and stylistic features in a given work register ideas that may not be fully understood or deliberately engaged; and second, because the category of form misses the crucial process of sensory engagement that the aesthetic, as a category, necessarily registers. Kandice Chuh makes this argument so convincingly in The Difference Aesthetics Makes. She contends that aesthetic encounters can “shift the distribution of sensibility”[10] away from colonial racial capitalism toward anticolonial ways of being in the world, and they can do so because the aesthetic, as a category, entails sensory perception, and the sensory necessarily also involves conceptual understanding.

Of course, aesthetics is a notoriously vexed category, as David Lloyd has brilliantly articulated, especially in postcolonial studies and other fields that attend to processes of racialization and colonial domination. Yet, to cede aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic modes of knowing and encountering the world is to disempower the humanities and to negate the long history of resistance to imperialism and racism as enacted through aesthetic production and experience. As part of refusing that negation, my work theorizes literature as productive by identifying the interplay between ideational and material conditions, inspired by the work of Raymond Williams and Pheng Cheah. In What is a World?, Cheah brings his deconstructive allegiances to bear on material conditions, convincingly arguing that literature participates in producing new social orders by generating new norms that themselves exert force on the world.

This quick sketch of some of my theoretical commitments helps to clarify one of the main claims that subtends Aesthetic Impropriety, which is that anticolonial literary innovations and emerging legal ideas share compositional logics, and that, while these logics are easier to see as compositional in aesthetic contexts, they operate in legal instruments and discourse, too.

So, for instance, Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things aesthetically configures a commitment to egalitarian relation that consistently undermines the structures of domination constraining the lives of this novel’s characters, including misogyny—the focus of my analysis—and caste prejudice. In contrast to legal and social structures that enforce local and colonial patterns of patriarchal domination, Roy aesthetically produces a feminist-socialist mode of equitable relation in her text: she does this through a range of stylistic practices, including linguistic refrains that echo throughout the text, subtly connecting seemingly disparate scenes that are instead shown to bear crucial bonds; the narrative’s recursive structure, which challenges the sequence of events that trap Ammu and the other characters in tragic time; and the imagery of excess that patterns this novel’s environmental descriptions, where objects repeatedly burst their bounds. (We see a similar ecological understanding of constitutive, non-dominative relation in the two Nigerian texts that I analyze, Okri’s “What the Tapster Saw” and Obioma’s The Fishermen). The tragic ending to The God of Small Things, in which Ammu dies at the young age of thirty-one, after being ejected from her family home by her brother, who had inherited it from their father, is figured in this novel’s plot as the direct result of exclusionary inheritance laws: during the 1960s, when this novel is set, and for the Syrian Christian community to which Ammu belongs, the law held that a family home would be inherited by sons and never daughters.

Crucially, the reciprocal logic of gender equitable property rights that Roy establishes in her novel is also evidenced in the ways that feminist activists and jurists have transformed India’s inheritance and divorce laws over the last forty years: from the 1986 case Mary Roy v. State of Kerala, when Judge Bhagwati determined that Roy’s mother was entitled to an equal share of the inheritance just like her brothers; to the Indian Succession Amendment Act of 2002, when most Indian women were granted equal inheritance rights to men; to 2013, when the Marriage Laws Amendment Bill, which would have provided equal property to women upon divorce, stalled in India’s lower house of parliament, but not without first passing the upper house—and partial wins are still wins, especially in India’s current moment of heteropatriarchal, far-right ethnonationalism.

So, my reading of feminist critiques of Indian inheritance and divorce laws functions by identifying conceptual and aesthetic patterns not only across literary works but across legal contexts, too. I call these patterns structures of thought, in a way that’s somewhat similar to Williams’s account of structures of feeling. And recognizing these structures of thought across both legal and literary contexts enables us to see improper transformations as they take place. We can see that legal transformations to proprietary laws are in process; that legal reforms are not always harmful (despite the law’s history as a tool of colonial, white supremacist violence) and are, indeed, sometimes emancipatory; and that shifting structures of thought, which are evidenced aesthetically across distinct venues, signal broader social, ideological, political, and epistemic transformations during their process of unfolding.

Another way to see this argument is to prioritize the literary rather than the legal. And in this sense, my book argues that literary works slowly participate in transforming widely distributed ideas about how our worlds should be organized. Their abstraction and indirectness mean that their impact cannot be easily measured, but their cumulative weight suggests that they do bear material impact. In their circulation, they both register and, frequently, produce new structures of thought. And these aesthetic practices of slowly shifting sensibilities are part of the broader process of transforming social relations that also takes place—often similarly slowly—in litigation and statutory reform.

RT: I think this argument is so pertinent to the current state of literary criticism. When reading your book, I really enjoyed tracing how your close readings reroute questions of form (a term I typically use and you helpfully critique) to a historical materialist account of aesthetics—especially through Williams’s notion of structures of feeling, which you repurpose so convincingly. And by modeling this sort of reading within your broader project of impropriety, you exemplify a deconstructive practice that isn’t content to just sit around daydreaming of a just law “to come,” but is instead focused on the transformation of social relations in the here and now. Your reading of The God of Small Things is brilliant in this regard. Yes, Roy indexes the domination of unjust legal practices after colonialism, but her novel also aesthetically models a response, a mode of equitably connecting ourselves to each other and the world. And so we’re back to your comments at the beginning of this conversation. Literature does more than critique. It also makes, as you put it.

Thanks so much for this conversation, Rose. Your book opened my eyes to the ubiquitous role of anglophone law in postcolonial literature. It’s all over the texts I teach and write about! I’ve already been drawing from your book while teaching, so I’m really grateful for your excellent contribution to our field. I think we have more to discuss in the future: the differences between form and aesthetics, the relationship between deconstructive and dialectical thinking in postcolonial studies, maybe even the relationship between the material and the spiritual. This process of thinking together keeps giving me more questions!

RC: Yes, thank you so much, Ryan, for such an incredible conversation. There’s so much more that we could have talked about here! I have really appreciated the challenge of thinking in dialogue with a scholar whose work I admire so much, and I have to say that the process has taught me as much about my own work as about your brilliant scholarship. I hope that others find reading this dialogue as useful and interesting as the writing process has been for me. I can’t wait to keep talking and collaborating!

Notes

[1] Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 2.

[2] Naimou, Salvage Work.

[3] Mawani, Across Oceans of Law.

[4] Slaughter, “World Literature as Property.”

[5] Neti, Colonial Law in India and the Victorian Imagination.

[6] Topper, Animist Poetics, 14.

[7] Topper, 91.

[8] Topper, 102.

[9] Topper, 91.

[10] Chuh, The Difference Aesthetics Makes, 21.

 

Works Cited

Casey, Rose. Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style. New York: Fordham University Press, 2025.

Cheah, Pheng. What is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016.

Chuh, Kandice. The Difference Aesthetics Makes: On the Humanities “After Man.” Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove, 1967.

Forna, Aminatta. The Memory of Love. London: Bloomsbury, 2011.

Freud, Sigmund. “Moses and Monotheism.” In The Penguin Freud Library Volume 13: The Origins of Religion: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and Other Works, translated by James Strachey, edited by Albert Dickson, 237–386. London: Penguin, 1990.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Edited by Gunzelin Chmid Noerr, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Indian Succession (Amendment) Act, 2002 (Act No. 26 of 2002) (India). Indian Kanoon, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1529594/

“Indigenous Knowledge Act.” Protection, Promotion, Development and Management of Indigenous Knowledge Act 6 of 2019 (Notice 1082, Government Gazette 42647) (19 Aug. 2019) (South Africa). South African Government, https://www.gov.za/documents/acts/protection-promotion-development-and-management-indigenous-knowledge-act-6-2019

Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. Moses, Citizen, and Me. London: Granta, 2005.

Marriage Laws Amendment Bill, 2013 (Bill No. 41 of 2010 as passed by Rajya Sabha) (lapsed) (India). PRS Legislative Research, https://prsindia.org/files/bills_acts/bills_parliament/2010/Marriage_Laws_Bill_as_passed_by_RS.pdf

Mrs. Mary Roy Etc. Etc. v. State of Kerala & Ors. AIR 101 SCR 1-371 (1986) (India). Indian Kanoon, https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1143189.

“Navigation Acts.” An Act for Increase of Shipping, and Encouragement of the Navigation of this Nation (October 1651) (England and Wales). In Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, edited by C.H. First and R S. Rait, 559–62. London, 1911. British History Online, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp559­­-562

Obioma, Chigozie. The Fishermen. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2016.

Okri, Ben. “What the Tapster Saw.” In Stars of the Near Curfew, 189­–94. New York: Vintage, 1999

Phalafala, Uhuru Portia. Mine Mine Mine. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraksa Press, 2023.

Philip, M. NourbeSe. Zong! Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Roy, Arundhati. The God of Small Things. New York: Random House, 1997.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.

Soyinka, Wole. Death and the King’s Horseman Edited by Simon Gikandi. New York: Norton, 2003.

Topper, Ryan, Animist Poetics: Ancestral Trauma and Regeneration in African Literature. Albany: SUNY  Press, 2025.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.