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Suicideality in Contemporary African Diaspora Fiction

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Suicideality in Contemporary African Diaspora Fiction “ONE FOOT ON THE OTHER SIDE”: SUICIDEALITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN DIASPORA FICTION A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School at the University of Missouri-Columbia In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy By KATELYN HARLIN Dr. Christopher N. Okonkwo, Dissertation Supervisor July, 2020 The undersigned, appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School, have examined the dissertation entitled “ONE FOOT ON THE OTHER SIDE”: SUICIDEALITY IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN DIASPORA FICTION Presented by Katelyn Harlin, A candidate for the degree Doctor of Philosophy, And hereby certify that, in their opinion, it is worthy of acceptance. ________________________________________________________ Professor Christopher N. Okonkwo ________________________________________________________ Professor Sheri-Marie Harrison ________________________________________________________ Professor Karen Piper ________________________________________________________ Professor Christina Carney ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing this dissertation has been among the most rewarding experiences of my life, and I am grateful to more people than can be possible named. First, thank you to Chris Okonkwo, for seeing in me a student and a scholar worthy of such attentive guidance over the course of seven years. Some of the most important thoughts and ideas I’ve ever had came to me in Tate 324. I will need a video of you silently widening your eyes and pointing at me to watch every time I have a break-through. Sheri Harrison, thank you for being a mentor to me, and for helping me get out of my own way whenever possible. You have modeled for me the kind of academic I hope to be: rigorous, generous, tenacious, well-rounded, diligent. And you taught me to probe that which makes me angry, confused, or uncomfortable. I have been incredible lucky to benefit from the guidance of so many faculty members throughout my time completing my MA and PhD at MU. Thanks especially to my other committee members, Christina Carney, who always has the exact book I need to read right at the front of her mind, and Karen Piper for helping me to engage rigorously with Postcolonial theory and do Frantz Fanon justice. I am also grateful to MU faculty members Becca Hayes, Steve Karian, Sam Cohen, Emma Lipton, Johanna Kramer, and Andy Hoberek for helping me to navigate the treacherous terrain of the final years of the PhD: dissertations, first publications, and the job market. In 2018 I was lucky enough to travel to Lagos, Nigeria for the Aké Book & Arts festival, and that trip has stayed with me and introduced me to people and books that continue to shape my work. Thank you to the John D. Bies Graduate Scholarship from ii MU for making that trip possible, as well as Ayatola, Tolu, and everyone else I met in Lagos. This project and my new faculty position would not have been possible without the community of colleagues and friends I have made in Columbia, MO. I am especially grateful to my ADS family, Tofunmi and Elorm, as well as my dear friends Jen, Charlene, Leanna, Steven, and Drew for helping me in the ways they were most able: encouragement, brunch, book recommendations, gossip, movie nights, etc. The group chats and the Zoom dates have been literal lifesavers in these past few COVID-19 months. Carli Sinclair, who has been my dedicated writing partner for going on 4 years, is perhaps the person most responsible for actually getting me and my dissertation over this finish line. Her warmth, dedication, dependability, and unrelenting support have meant so much to me over these past years. So much of my best work so far has been done across the table from Carli at Uprise Bakery. Thank you to Elise Broaddus for being my person throughout this graduate school gauntlet. No accomplishment feels real until we split a bottle of house red at RagTag. I genuinely don’t know if I would have made it through this program without you. Sorry for being maudlin. Finally, I am so, so thankful to my entire family. Neither my parents Paul and Deborah, my brother Jim, nor my husband David ever once questioned why on Earth I wanted to get a PhD in literature. Thank you for carrying this heavy dream with me. Put your feet up—we made it! iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………….......ii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….1 Chapter 1: Beginning at the End of the World…………………………………………..39 Chapter 2: Walk, Swim, Leap. …………..………………………………………..……..68 Chapter 3: Wombs and Bombs…………………………………….……………..…….100 Chapter 4: West-African Spiritual-Realism ……………………………………………138 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………...177 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….183 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………...190 iv Introduction When this dissertation first began to take shape, it was in response to a period of wide reading of African diaspora fiction—my comprehensive exam preparations-- wherein I began noticing the sheer number of suicides I was encountering. After some preliminary research, I was further struck by how little criticism confronted this literary trope in African diaspora texts. In the beginning, I assumed that this phenomenon was the manifestation of the contemporary focus on mental health and mental illness, which while largely a product of Western medicine, neoliberal discourses of self-reliance and Capitalist “self-care” branding, has certainly been circulating globally for a number of years now. Thus, I expected this dissertation to be a discussion of Africana writers’ efforts to resist, revise, combine or consolidate these discourses with the cultural, political, and ontological concerns of Blackness, ultimately offering a new, more Africanized method of thinking through mental health and mental illness. In some ways, this proved true; in particular, I believe this is evident and legible through the Ògbánje and àbíkú fiction discussed in chapter four of this dissertation. However, over time this project outgrew that framework, and efforts to link Black literary suicides to the real- world experiences of suicidality and mental illness became at best, specious, and at worst pathologizing. Thus, with mere months before my planned defense, I reconceived of what the work of this project actually is. The primary points that I hope this project makes are as follows: 1. Suicide is a foundational and constitutive trope of what we might call Anglophone African diaspora literatures. 1 2. Suicide in these texts is experienced on the level of community: by their nature, these suicides subordinate the individual’s “right” to life to the collective’s hopes for survival. 3. These representations of suicide reflect an Afrocentric, nonlinear conception of time and space. Often, suicides occur because of the belief that another simultaneous reality exists and is accessible through the death of the body. 4. Western, neoliberal tropes of the individual as improvable and perhaps even perfectible through introspection and work have throughout the 60-year scope of this project put pressure on the Afro-centric, collective literary meaning of suicides. 5. Contemporary African diasporic fiction is marked by its willingness to engage with 3 and 4 simultaneously, as ideas that are in tension, but not conflict, and which therefore do not require resolution. 6. Ultimately, African literature operating under what I term suicideality offers radical political potential because it constructs modes of collaboration and coalition across boundaries, especially boundaries between life and death/living and dead. Therefore, rather than significant emphasis on the sociological or medical discourses of suicide, this project will be focused on interrogating the imaginative act of suicide and its implications within African diaspora literature; particularly, I am interested in the ways the imaginative act of suicide articulates ontology, space-time, and the body. Therefore, I will draw from Black psychology as well as literary theory, political manifestos, Black Atlantic theories and Black feminist theories of assemblage. 2 Concept Definition: Suicideality In Contemplating Suicide (1995), Gavin J. Fairbairn discusses the definitional problem of suicide; in particular, he points out that traditional definitions of suicide are “retrospective”, they require a successful completion of the act to fall under the category of suicide. Furthermore, these definitions place emphasis on the action of self-killing, rather on the intentions and agency of the person performing the action (70). Therefore, Fairbairn proposes the revised definition of suicide as “an act, whether of commission or omission, and whether performed by himself or others, by means of which one autonomously intends and wishes to bring about his death because he wants to die or wants to die the death he enacts” (84). Several aspects of this definition are significant: first, the word “omission” provides room for us to conceive of suicide through neglect; to die by suicide from, for example, starving oneself becomes possible through this definition. It also allows the actual killing to be enacted by someone else; for example, a person who intentionally acts in order to provoke a police officer to shoot and kill him can be said to have committed suicide by this definition. Finally, the qualification that the actor may not want to die generally, but to die a particular kind of “death he enacts” allows for the possibility that a person who would not be considered “suicidal”, clinically or otherwise, may still wish to perform a particular
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