Chapter 16 - Affective Form

Summary

In this chapter, I examine a singular instance of affective form in postcolonial fiction, which puts the body back in the body while also sustaining affect as a virtual substance, a potentiality that exceeds material and formal embodiments. Drawing on Aminatta Forna’s The Memory of Love (2010) and Happiness (2018), I examine key psychoanalytic and psychiatric categories such as PTSD, trauma, fugue, and narrative memory as they are transported globally. Focusing on fraught contexts such as the Sierra Leonian Civil War evoked by Forna, the essay examines the entrenched assumptions and soulmaking politics of Western epistemologies of consciousness, offering the affect of Forna’s novels as an alternative depiction of the concrete and abstract materialities of traumatic states.