Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery

Yogita Goyal

Published by New York University Press 2019

Runaway Genres

The Global Afterlives of Slavery

Yogita Goyal

https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479829590.001.0001

Overview
Contents

About this book

Winner, 2021 René Wellek Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association

Winner, 2021 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award, given by the International Society for the Study of Narrative

Honorable Mention, 2020 James Russell Lowell Prize, given by the Modern Language Association

Argues that the slave narrative is a new world literary genre

In Runaway Genres, Yogita Goyal tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. The post-black satire of Paul Beatty and Mat Johnson, modern slave narratives from Sudan to Sierra Leone, and the new Afropolitan diaspora of writers like Teju Cole and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie all are woven into Goyal’s argument for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of this new ethical globalism. From the humanitarian spectacles of Kony 2012 and #BringBackOurGirls through gothic literature, Runaway Genres unravels, for instance, how and why the African child soldier has now appeared as the afterlife of the Atlantic slave.

Goyal argues that in order to fathom forms of freedom and bondage today—from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to genocide—we must turn to contemporary literature, which reveals how the literary forms used to tell these stories derive from the antebellum genre of the slave narrative. Exploring the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, the book presents alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offers not just an occasion to revisit the Atlantic past, but also for re-narrating the global present. In reassessing these legacies and their ongoing relation to race and the human, Runaway Genres creates a new map with which to navigate contemporary black diaspora literature.

Author / Editor information

Goyal Yogita :

Yogita Goyal is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA, author of Romance, Diaspora, and the Black Atlantic Literature and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. She edits the journal Contemporary Literature and is President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P.).Yogita Goyal is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA, author of Romance, Diaspora, and the Black Atlantic Literature and the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. She edits the journal Contemporary Literature and is President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P.).

Reviews

Rita Barnard, University of Pennsylvania:
Runaway Genres, compendious, astute, and relentlessly skeptical, is an agenda-setting book for a new mode of comparative literacy and a more politically attuned conception of the global novel.

Any library that considers itself a research library should procure a copy of this impressive study, which makes a significant contribution to the fields of American, African, African American, and comparative literary studies.

Argues that analogies to slavery do not adequately explain modern-day abuses ... Goyal provides examples of recent African and African American novelists who have exploded this sentimental framework. In place of inevitable freedom, they offer more complicated and unsettling endings.

A persuasive argument not only for slave narratives’ enduring relevance but for their particular urgency in our historical moment. … In this essential contribution to the field, Goyal lays bare the recursive pain of U.S. slavery, the challenges of writing and reading its ‘unspeakable’ horrors, and what is at stake when we analogize slave narratives with contemporary crises across the globe.

Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University:
In Runaway Genres, Yogita Goyal brings a totally new perspective to the study of slavery and race and their effects on the global imagination. Combining a mastery of the archive of slavery with careful arguments and nuanced theoretical claims, this book is bound to transform the way we think about American literature, endowing it with a fresh transnationalism.

Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original:
A richly textured and startlingly original meditation on the meaning and uses of contemporary ‘neo-slave narratives.’ Displaying an impressive analytical sophistication and historical depth, Yogita Goyal reveals how these new narratives open a window onto a range of contemporary global developments, from human trafficking to illegal immigration, child soldiering to forced marriage, debt bondage to domestic servitude. Essential and timely, Runaway Genres cements Yogita Goyal’s position as one of the most gifted intellectuals of her generation.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction: The Genres of Slavery Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Sentimental Globalism Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	35
2. The Gothic Child Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	69
3. Post- Black Satire Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	105
4. Talking Books (Talking Back) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
5. We Need New Diasporas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	171
Epilogue: What We Talk about When We Talk about Slavery Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	223
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
About the Author Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263