Publications
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.
By Yogita Goyal
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We now live in an era where slavery is seemingly everywhere: a fit subject for solemn memorials, irreverent comedy, imaginative reconstruction, an allegory of contemporary racial politics, or an enterprise of painstaking fact-finding for historians. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today–from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to genocide–professor Goyal 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.