Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery by Yogita Goyal, and: Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination ed. by Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal

Abstract

Reviewed by: Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery by Yogita Goyal, and: Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination ed. by Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal Gwen Bergner Yogita Goyal. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York: New York UP, 2019. 271 pp. $30.00. Eds. Bertram D. Ashe and Ilka Saal. Slavery and the Post-Black Imagination. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2020. 248 pp. $30.00. If Stephen Best wrote "the epitaph of the Beloved moment" to free Black identity from a melancholic relation to slavery and disrupt the assumed continuity between slavery's past and racial inequalities today, then these two books examine how the next generation makes use of slavery's history. Both acknowledge the neo-slave narrative, emblematized by Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), reigned for several decades as the "paradigmatic mode for thinking about African American identity and history" (Goyal 1), but hail new ways of reckoning with slavery's meaning today. Goyal sticks with the slave narrative form, but asks what happens when it goes global. Current human rights abuses, from trafficking to undocumented immigration, from conscription of child soldiers to forced marriage, from debt bondage to domestic servitude, now use the neo-slave narrative as an analogic template. Goyal asks how this analogy functions, "what histories does it summon, what hidden relations between power and knowledge make visible?" (10). Ashe and Saal recognize its globalization, but declare a radical break with the neo-slave narrative paradigm by post-Black artists in the United States. Branching beyond the literary, the essays explore how Black cultural productions since 1987 "refigure canonical, popular, and sacrosanct narratives, motifs, memes, and iconographies" to stage new encounters with slavery (Ashe and Saal 17). Together, these books explore how new aesthetic forms "counter[] the hegemony of any single genealogy of blackness" (Goyal 15). Arguing the slave narrative is now a "world literary genre" (4-5), Goyal examines this global proliferation through a variety of literary contexts, from narratives of conscripted African child soldiers to the new African diaspora in the United States. With chapters organized by genre, including the sentimental, the gothic, satire, surrogation, and revisionism, she asks how the analogy between transatlantic slavery and contemporary phenomena of migration, trauma, and global racial formations functions. In two chapters on narratives of African child soldiers, Goyal is critical of sentimental narratives, such as a memoir by Francis Bok and a novel by Dave Eggers that let Western readers imagine themselves as global citizens "via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity" (13), but in the process dehistoricize and universalize the particular causes of the traumas they narrate. By contrast, Goyal appreciates the "gothic" narratives by Chris Abani and Ahmadou Lourouma that "refus[e] closure or redemption" (13). These versions depart from the classic slave narrative's sympathetic appeal by uncovering silenced histories and "challeng[ing] the absolute innocence demanded by human rights advocates" (13). Like the gothic narratives, Goyal appreciates recent African American post-Black satires of slavery by Mat Johnson, Paul Beatty, and Colson Whitehead that use "absurd juxtapositions, surreal analogies, and farcical adventures" (14) to expose the contradiction inherent in the previous generation's neo-slave narratives, which claimed that slavery persists while narrating escape from its regime. Succeeding [End Page 341] chapters include an exploration of texts Goyal sees as challenging Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s tradition-founding premise that literacy delivered Black freedom by allowing the objectified slave to write him or herself into Enlightenment subjectivity. Rather than accepting the Western equation of literacy with subjectivity, Toni Morrison, Caryl Phillips, Robin Coste Lewis, and M. NourbeSe Philip "refigure the relations among liberal Enlightenment ideas of humanity, the black presence in the West, and the expansion of the African American literary tradition to a more global one across time and space" (145) by "ventriloquizing" the words, language, and texts of the Western tradition to unsettle their racial epistemologies. The final chapter considers how writers of "the new African Diaspora," such as Chris Abani, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, NoViolet Bulawayo, Teju Cole, and Dinaw Mengetsu provide narratives of migration, postcolonial Africa, and the vicissitudes of globalization. These texts indicate that the Black Atlantic diasporic...