Feb. 22, 2018 – Yogita Goyal
“Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery”—Roger Reeves in Conversation with Yogita Goyal will take place in 160 Willard Building, on Thursday, February 22, at 6:00 p.m.
Description: Professor Goyal will present research from her forthcoming scholarly book on the emergence of Atlantic slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. As the Mediterranean refugee crisis has unfolded, parallels to the transatlantic slave trade have multiplied, inviting a consideration of new ways of thinking about how we understand race and racial formation across past and present landscapes, and in relation to new geographies of terror and containment by the state. What does it mean to view a contemporary – and still unfolding – crisis through the lens of a historical event like slavery? How might we harness the radical potential of new forms of abolition for dissent and resistance today?
This event is co-sponsored with the Modern and Contemporary Studies Initiative.
Yogita Goyal is Associate Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA, editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature, and Vice-President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P.). She is the author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010), guest editor of a special issue of Research in African Literatures (Fall 2014) and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (2017). She is currently writing a book on the revival of the slave narrative as a new world literary genre, titled “Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery.”
By Yogita Goyal:
