![]() 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. 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. 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). ![]() It opens, after all, with a consideration of memorialization and monuments, which have become such an important point of contestation in the U.S. But in the months (and now years) that have followed, the work has come to seem even more important and urgent. ![]() RUNAWAY GENRES: THE GLOBAL AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY BY YOGITA GOYAL NYU Press, 2019Įven 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. ![]()
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