Yogita Goyal

This essay draws on Edward Said’s meditations on exile to critique Mohsin Hamid’s representation of the migrant as a universal figure in his acclaimed 2017 novel, Exit West. I propose that Hamid naturalizes the fact of migration in a way that evacuates the specific historical experience that generates it, rendering banal what must remain historical. Along the way, I consider Hamid’s equation of migration to story-telling, exploring how such a claim reorders our understanding of the novel’s relationship to place. I also examine how the refugee novel as a genre reckons with the difficulties of representation in relation to debates in visual culture as well as in response to a number of recent calls to stage the contemporary refugee in connection with past histories of racial dispossession. I thus probe claims to the singularity of the refugee as well as attempts to create itineraries of ethical and historical relation.

This essay takes up W.E.B. Du Bois's theorization of internationalism, focusing on his representation of India as racial kin and anti-colonial herald, especially his suggestion of an analogy between race and caste, by reading him alongside Nobel Prize-winning poet and philosopher, Rabindranath Tagore. I juxtapose Du Bois and Tagore to recover a submerged history of a sustained dialogue between India and the United States over whether race and caste can be thought of as analogies, and what such efforts reveal about transnational method: the politics of comparison outside a core-periphery model, the tangled relations among modernity, race, and caste, and ultimately, the conditions of possibility of the Global South.

In this interview, Yaa Gyasi talks to Yogita Goyal about the faithlessness of history, misrecognitions across the Atlantic, the shifting meaning of Blackness, the benefits of creative writing programs for budding writers, and the restorative power of fiction.

Yogita Goyal, author of Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery, joins Eric, Medaya, and Kate to discuss the shape of traditional slave narrative and the ways it has been transformed over the past 70 years across the world and in different genres. Goyal talks about what drew her to this subject, and about teaching the slave story in the Trump and Kanye era. She contrasts abolitionist era slave narratives with those from the past five decades, following their return to prominence in African-American literature in the 1970s, bringing together work by Paul Beatty, Colson Whitehead, and Toni Morrison.

This essay reads celebrated novels of the twenty-first century African diaspora to rethink existing ways of thinking about migration and blackness.  Analyzing novels by Chris Abani (GraceLand, 2004), NoViolet Bulawayo (We Need New Names, 2013), and Dinaw Mengestu (The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, 2007), I show how they escape the polarized assumptions of African literature as either offering stock portraits of trauma or championing cosmopolitan or Afropolitan privilege.  Instead, they ask for a deeper evaluation of intertwined and uncertain legacies of slavery and colonialism across the globe, challenging the hegemony of Atlantic frames of diaspora and the slave sublime.  In moving away from well-worn frames of racial ancestry or heritage, such novels present fresh ways to conceive of race and racial formation in a global frame, as well as innovative forms of representing black humanity, agency, and futurity in the literature of migration and diaspora.

This essay reads Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (2015) as an exemplary occasion to stage the dilemmas of postcolonial reading in the present, especially in relation to the global War on Terror declared by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Reading Guantánamo Diary in relation to a genre it clearly seems to echo—the African American slave narrative—the essay argues that the analogy to slavery enables a deeper sense of the multiple and overlapping histories of race and empire but also obscures the transnational geography of detention signaled by Slahi as well as his damning comment on the failed project of postcolonial sovereignty. Showing how attention to questions of genre and their circulation across the globe illuminates the politics of terror and detention, the essay elaborates the possible ethics and aesthetics of postcolonial reading in the present.

This essay argues that contemporary American conceptions of African atrocity are haunted by the specter of slavery, which structures the ways in which a relation between the United States and Africa is imagined. Francis Bok’s memoir, Escape from Slavery (2003), and Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What (2006) reveal the stakes of this literary haunting, where the canonical Atlantic genre of the antebellum slave narrative is called into play to narrate contemporary Sudanese stories, thus refashioning the politics of race and diaspora for a neoliberal age. Reading for the formal and ideological exchanges between subject, author, and amanuensis, the essay shows how the discourse of modern slavery relies on sentimental humanism to generate a seemingly new way for Americans to imagine themselves as global citizens, constituting themselves as global via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity.

This essay reads George Schuyler’s transnational fantasies – Black Empire, Ethiopian Fictions, and Slaves Today – as a sustained critique and parody of the era’s Pan-Africanism, especially of W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of black Zionism and Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa movement. In refusing to imagine a global black community linked by racial or political identification, Schuyler denaturalizes race and makes visible the blind spots of current transnational approaches which continue to make the same romantic assumptions about race as a global binding force that he undermined.

Author of six acclaimed novels, including GraceLand (2004), The Virgin of Flames (2007), and The Secret History of Las Vegas (2014), seven collections of poetry, and numerous critical essays on literature, art, ethics, photography, and cities, Chris Abani is now one of the most important African writers. In this interview, Abani evaluates his place in Nigerian, African, and world literature, touching along the way on topics as diverse as nationalism and transnationalism, the meaning of history and trauma for contemporary writers, and the tension between thinking like a critic and a creative writer.

GOYAL, YOGITA. "African American Literature, Criticism and Theory." The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies. Ray, Sangeeta, Henry Schwarz, José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Alberto Moreiras and April Shemak (eds). Blackwell Publishing, 2016. Blackwell Reference Online. 21 November 2017 <http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode.html?id=g9781444334982_chunk_g97814443349825_ss1-4>

Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today – from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to genocide – this project reads a vast range of contemporary literature, showing 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 forwards alternative conceptions of human rights, showing that the revival and proliferation of slave narratives offers not just a chance to rethink the legacy of slavery itself, but also to assess its ongoing relation to race and the human. Taking form seriously in discussions of minority literature, the book examines key genres associated with the slave narrative: sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman. By offering a theory of form and how it travels, the book argues for the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, exploring the full complexity of an ethical globalism. Traversing multiple genres and disciplines, the book speaks to African diaspora and African American studies, transnational and world literatures, American Studies, postcolonial and global studies, and human rights. Showing how slavery provides the occasion not just for revisiting the Atlantic past but for renarrating the global present, Runaway Genres creates a new map of contemporary black diaspora literature.

This special issue explores the place of Africa in the vibrant field of black Atlantic studies, showing how debates about Africa power conceptions of black modernity and postmodernity.  It includes essays on global African writers, Islam and Arab nationalism, affect and diaspora, Cold War, slavery and Atlanticism, comparative racialization, an interview with Chris Abani, and an afterword by Simon Gikandi.

This Companion offers a comprehensive account of the scope, impact, and critical possibilities of the transnational turn, situating the study of American literature in relation to ethnic, postcolonial, hemispheric, and global studies.  Fifteen chapters by leading scholars provide state-of-the-field analyses contextualizing and demonstrating the implications of their topics for scholars of U.S. literary and cultural studies at large as well as offering close readings and textual case studies of major writers.