Yogita Goyal - Runaway genres : the global afterlives of slavery

Yogita Goyal

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

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2019 by New York University

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Goyal, Yogita, author.

Title: Runaway genres : the global afterlives of slavery / Yogita Goyal.

Description: New York : New York University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019006929| ISBN 9781479829590 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479832712 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: SlaveryHistory. | African diaspora. | GlobalizationSocial aspectsAfricaHistory.

Classification: LCC HT861 .G69 2019 | DDC 306.3/6209dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006929

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For my father

in memoriam

Madan Lal Goyal

Something new is beginningor perhaps something old and nasty is reviving.

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Some twenty-five years ago, Toni Morrison lamented that there was no suitable memorial to slavery in the United Statesno plaque or wreath [or] three hundred foot tower, not even a small bench by the road. Explaining how she wrote Beloved to counteract this national amnesia and urge to erasure, Morrison claimed that because such a place does not exist (that I know of), the book had to. Now, however, slavery is seemingly everywhere, in every form, 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. In other words, slavery is now the site for the reinvention of form.

That slavery offers immense aesthetic and political resources to contemporary African American writers is not at all surprising. After all, current forms of inequality and race-based discrimination can easily be traced back to slavery, as both institutional and psychic afterlives, as structures and as structures of feeling. And the fields of art, literature, history, and political theory have all been transformed by the study of slavery and its varied afterlives. In literature, especially, the dominance of the neo-slave narrative over the last four decades as the paradigmatic mode for thinking about African American identity and history is now axiomatic. Such writers as Dionne Brand, Octavia Butler, Fred DAguiar, Bernardine Evaristo, Marlon James, Charles Johnson, Edward Jones, Gayl Jones, Andrea Levy, James McBride, M. NourbeSe Philip, Caryl Phillips, Alice Randall, Colson Whitehead, and Sherley Anne Williams have satisfied Morrisons call and fully memorialized slavery and its constitutive role in any conception of the nations past, present, and future. Moreover, philosophies of history derived from slavery, inquiries into practices of archival recovery, studies of racial capitalism, and debates about ethics and affect have assumed center stage in current scholarship. The extensive activism around prison abolition and ending mass incarceration, to take just one example, substantiates a clear understanding of the foundational role of slavery and its incomplete abolition in the discriminatory laws that shape current US carceral regimes. In recent years, debates about reparations, Confederate statues, and antebellum nostalgia, calls for accounting for the universitys connection to slavery, and renewed attention to ideologies of white supremacy and antiblackness have all helped shape the volatile afterlife of slavery in the political sphere.

But slavery appears in more than such historical or memorial garb. Slavery, in fact, frames a range of contemporary phenomena across the globe: from human trafficking to illegal immigration, from conscription in war as a child soldier to forced marriage, from debt bondage to domestic servitude. Such parallels to the transatlantic slave trade proliferate in contemporary culture, demanding new ways of understanding racial formation across past and present landscapes, and in relation to new geographies of terror and containment. Runaway Genres tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood in order to rethink race in a global frame. Neo-abolitionist movements to end child labor, human rights campaigns against human trafficking and supportive of the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, feminist efforts to end the exploitation of sex workers, populist advocacy for animal rights, antiabortion efforts, activism against incarceration, discrimination based on caste, and the abuse of migrant labor all make rampant use of slavery to elicit support for their cause. And to do so, they rely on the same power of narrative that abolitionists once did. As one Boston editor put it in 1840, Argument provokes argument, reason is met by sophistry; but narratives of slaves go right to the hearts of men.

Continuing this appeal to the hearts of men, writers across the globefrom India to Ireland, Nigeria to Uganda, Haiti to South Africa, Sri Lanka to Sierra Leoneare reviving the slave narrative, a clearly

To answer these questions, I locate the global proliferation of the slave narrative at the confluence of three forces: increasing large-scale migration, the ongoing appeal of sentimentalism to narrate trauma, and a historical tendency to see current events as repetitions of the past. The slave narrative, a story of escape from bondage, presented as a sentimental appeal to the readers empathy, often vouched for by a sympathetic white editor, uncannily matches contemporary accounts of refugees, asylum seekers, survivors of trafficking and conscription in war. What W. E. B. Du Bois memorably called the most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human historythe large-scale transportation of Africans to the Americasseems replicated in the scale and trauma of contemporary migrations. In an age when feeling, affect, and empathy appear as substitutes for social change, the sentimental idiom favored by abolitionists comes in handy to narrate stories of oppression from the Global South. The conditions of empathetic reader and traumatized survivor neatly mirror those of the slave narrative. Returning to the pastby replaying tropes of the slave narrative, including accounts of exile and natal alienation, the concept of social death, the quest for literacy, the journey north to freedom, and dreams of the Jubileecontemporary literature chronicles the history of violence in a world that has not yet figured out a politics of reconciliation or reckoning.

Reading for the transformation of the slave narrative in contemporary fiction and nonfiction, I explicate as well as question the ways in which slavery remains at the heart of many models of transnational blackness. Because slavery has become a figure for contemporary inequality, an examination of the ghosts of past inequities not yet laid to rest, such returns to the past as much speak to a desire to understand history as they frame the possibilities of the present and the future. In exploring the contradictory uses of historical violence for contemporary politics, we need to not only return to the question of what slavery itself means but also account for how and when the slave narrative became malleable as a global form, available for adaptation across time and space.