Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery

Review\n"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." -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original\n"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." -- Simon Gikandi, Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University\n"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." ― Black Perspectives\n"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." ― Choice\n"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." ― Papers on Language and Literature\nWinner, 2021 René Wellek Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association\nWinner, 2021 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Award, given by the International Society for the Study of Narrative\nHonorable Mention, 2020 James Russell Lowell Prize, given by the Modern Language Association\nArgues that the slave narrative is a new world literary genre\nIn 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.\nGoyal 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.