'One foot on the other side' : suicideality in contemporary African diaspora fiction

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 Ogbanje and abiku 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. 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 ...