Rethinking Freedom: Slavery, Time, and Affect in the Global Novel

Abstract

Rethinking Freedom:Slavery, Time, and Affect in the Global Novel Rita Barnard (bio) RUNAWAY GENRES: THE GLOBAL AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY BY YOGITA GOYAL NYU Press, 2019 RUNAWAY GENRES: THE GLOBAL AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY BY YOGITA GOYAL NYU Press, 2019 Even before the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd's murder in 2020, Yogita Goyal's erudite and nuanced study of "the global afterlives of slavery" would have been acclaimed as an important academic book. But in the months (and now years) that have followed, the work has come to seem even more important and urgent. It opens, after all, with a consideration of memorialization and monuments, which have become such an important point of contestation in the U.S. Specifically, Goyal cites Toni Morrison, whose enormously influential Beloved was shaped by the novelist's deep regret that there was "no suitable memorial" to the slave experience: not a "plaque or wreath or three-hundred-foot tower," not even a "small bench by the road" (1). Goyal uses this poignant starting point to comment on the massive body of literature about the slave experience that has arisen since the publication of Beloved in 1987. Whether in forms that replicate those of the nineteenth-century slave narrative or those that break with its tropes and structures of feeling, the remembrance of slavery has radically shaped contemporary writing in the U.S. and beyond over the past three decades. And yet, Morrison's lament over inadequate public memorialization still seemed completely apt and timely in the last years of the Trump presidency, [End Page 179] when monuments to the Confederacy became a divisive and burning issue—vividly affirming Saidiya Hartman's observation that "if the ghost of slavery still haunts our present, it because we are still looking for an exit from the prison" (7). For evidence of this entrapment, we need look no further than Caroline Randall Williams's reflections on her "rape-colored skin" in a devastating New York Times essay from July 2020 entitled "My Body is a Confederate Monument," or, by way of heartless contrast, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton's contemporaneous remark that slavery was "a necessary evil." The events of that year certainly reawakened and intensified an awareness of what Faulkner once described as America's "debt that cannot be amortized"; and the struggle between remembering and misremembering the past is clearly ongoing. Goyal's understanding of the stakes of her project can be grasped along these lines. Absent a "politics of recognition and restitution," she declares, we will remain haunted by slavery's often uncanny afterlives (233). But as the title, Runaway Genres, suggests, this study is as much literary and formal as political. One of its animating observations is the contrast between the wildly inventive and irreverent ways in which American slavery has recently been treated by African American novelists (we might think of Paul Beatty's The Sellout, Mat Johnson's Pym, and Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad) and the formally conventional ways in which others have narrated the new forms of "slavery," such as human trafficking, debt peonage, mass incarceration, and involuntary migration. Indeed, as Goyal's first chapter demonstrates, these new global works not only replicate the formulaic narrative structures and affective modalities of the nineteenth-century slave narrative, but they do so in ways that replicate two problems associated with the form. Packaged by abolitionists and marketed to a Northern audience, the earlier slave narratives often operated as "a black message in a white envelope," thereby diminishing the narrator's authorial agency (60). They offered, moreover, certain self-congratulatory satisfactions through what Goyal grasps as a kind of sentimental substitution, whereby the narrative serves to prove not only the humanity of the suffering subject but also that of the empathetic reader as well. Though the form still clearly works, as evidenced by the excellent sales of books like Francis Bok's Escape from Slavery or [End Page 180] Dave Eggers's What Is the What?, those two ethically problematic narrative strategies abide. Indeed, the application of formulae born in a very particular historical context to contemporary forms of global oppression tend to exacerbate these problems of authorship, affect...