Yogita Goyal
Yogita Goyal
Professor of English & African American Studies
Phone: (310) 825-4820
Email: ygoyal@humnet.ucla.edu
Office: 228 Kaplan Hall
Biography
My research and teaching explore the relation between race and empire, nation and diaspora, and past and present in a broad range of African diaspora literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Most of my work foregrounds the articulation of literary form with social and political change, with a view to rethinking questions of social justice and ethics in historical and continuing forms of inequality.
My first book, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010), shifts the center of Black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of Black modernity, rather than its forgotten past. Reading works by Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Joseph Casely Hayford, Richard Wright, Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Caryl Phillips, I map an oscillation in Black thought between a romantic vision of Africa and a broadly realist Black nationalism – with Marcus Garvey’s dream of a Black empire and Frantz Fanon’s vision of revolution as symbols of each tendency.
My second book, Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery (NYU Press, 2019) tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today – from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to genocide – I read 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. Showing how slavery provides the occasion not just for revisiting the Atlantic past but for renarrating the global present, Runaway Genres creates a new map of contemporary Black diaspora literature. The book received the René Wellek Prize from ACLA, the Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of Narrative and Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from MLA.
I also edited two books: The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature (2023) and The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (2017). Other editorial work includes a special issue of Research in African Literatures (2014) on “Africa and the Black Atlantic” (2014), a co-edited special issue of Representations on “Anticolonialism as Theory” (2023), and a co-edited special issue of American Literary History on “Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees” (2022). I served as Editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature, for British and Anglophone Fiction (2015-2022), and as President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P.) from 2018-2019.
My work has been supported by fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and the UC President’s Office, and I was honored to receive UCLA’s Distinguished Teaching Award, the Eby Award for the Art of Teaching in 2022. Recent classes include “Thinking the Global,” “Remembering Slavery, Remaking Race,” “Black Utopia,” “Contemporary African American Literature,” and “Black Atlantic Travel Narratives.” I regularly teach classes on slavery and migration, African diaspora literature, the global novel, and postcolonial theory, and was the Director of Departmental Honors for English from 2013-2016, and Undergraduate Vice Chair for English from 2019-2023. In 2019, I was a Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin.
I’ve published over thirty-five articles on a wide range of Black diaspora, U.S., and Postcolonial literature, and am working on two projects: “Aesthetics of Refuge,” a monograph on twenty-first century refugee literature and culture, and “Genres of Anticolonialism: Rethinking Failure, Plotting Revolution,” a study of mid-twentieth century anticolonial thought and its current revival. For the past few years, I’ve been spearheading a set of initiatives to build more infrastructure for postcolonial thought, imagined as a comparative, cross-disciplinary, and revisionist endeavor.
Research Interests
- African American Literature
- Anglophone African Literature
- Black Atlantic/ Black Diaspora Studies, Novel
- Postcolonial Literature and Theory
- Transnational American Literature
- Slavery Studies.
Education
- Ph.D., Brown University, 2003
- M.A., Delhi University, 1997
- B.A. (Honors), St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, 1995
Publications
Books & Edited Volumes
- 2023. Editor, Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature. Cambridge University Press.
- 2023. Co-edited with Poulomi Saha, Special issue of Representations, “Anticolonialism as Theory.” 162.
- 2022. Co-edited with Gordon Hutner, Special issue of American Literary History, “Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees,” 34.3.
- 2019. Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery. New York University Press.
- 2017. Editor, Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature. Cambridge University Press.
- 2014. Guest Editor, Special Issue of Research in African Literatures, “Africa and the Black Atlantic,” 45.3.
- 2010. Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature. Cambridge University Press.
Articles
- 2023. “An Abstract Architecture: John Keene’s Counternarratives.” Post 45.
- 2023. “Anticolonialism as Theory.” Representations, 162.1: 1-10.
- 2023. “The U.S. and Geomodernism.” Cambridge History of American Modernism, ed. Mark Whalan. Cambridge University Press: 33-46.
- 2023. “Afro-Futurist Speculations and Diaspora.” Cambridge Critical Concepts, Diaspora, ed. Angela Naimou. Cambridge University Press: 112-125.
- 2022. “Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees.” American Literary History. 34.3: 853-862.
- 2022. “National Allegory and Beyond: Postcolonial Critique Now.” PMLA 137.3: 521-528. 2022. “Twentieth-Century Western Man of Color: Richard Wright, Race, and Rootlessness,” eds. Leslie Bow and Russ Castronovo, The Oxford Handbook to Twentieth Century American Literature: 171-188.
- 2022. “Standing at the Border.” American Literary History, 34.1: 186-198.
- 2021. “When Was the Afropolitan? Thinking Literary Genealogy.” PMLA 136.5” 778-784.
- 2020 “We Are All Migrants: The Refugee Novel and the Claims of Universalism.” Modern Fiction Studies 66.2 Summer: 239-259. [Winner of the Margaret Church Memorial Prize for 2020].
- 2020 “No Mere Slogans.” Review of Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents. Random House, 2020. The Los Angeles Review of Books.
- 2020 “Remembering Slavery, Remaking Race.” Response to symposium on Runaway Genres, Humanity Journal.
- 2019. “Postcolonial, Still.” Response to Forum on Forms of the Global Anglophone. Post 45
- 2019. “On Transnational Analogy: Thinking Race and Caste with W.E.B. Du Bois and Rabindranath Tagore.” Atlantic Studies: Global Currents 16.1: 54-71.
- 2019. “All of It Is Now: Slavery and the Post-Black Moment in Contemporary African American Literature.” Timelines of American Literature, eds. Cody Marrs and Christopher Hager. Johns Hopkins University Press: 228-242.
- 2018. “Un-American: Refugees and the Vietnam War.” PMLA 133 (2): 378-383.
- 2018. “No Strangers Here.” Los Angeles Review of Books.
- 2017. “We Need New Diasporas,” American Literary History, 29 4.1 (Winter): 640-663.
- 2017. “Third World Problems,” College Literature 44.4 (Fall): 467-474.
- 2017. “The Logic of Analogy: Slavery and the Contemporary Refugee,” Dossier on Contemporary Refugee Time-Spaces, ed. Angela Naimou. Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development. 8.3 (Winter): 543-546.
- 2017. “The Genres of Guantánamo Diary: Postcolonial Reading and the War on Terror.” The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry. Special issue on Postcolonial Reading Publics, ed. Ankhi Mukherjee, 4.1: 69-87.
- 2017. “Coming Home from Irony.” Interview with Percival Everett, Los Angeles Review of Books.
- 2017. “The Transnational Turn and Postcolonial Studies,” Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, ed. Yogita Goyal. Cambridge University Press, 53-71.
- 2017. “Introduction: The Transnational Turn.” Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, ed. Yogita Goyal. Cambridge University Press, 1-15.
- 2016. “Black Diaspora Literature and the Question of Slavery,” Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, eds. Leslie Eckel and Claire Elliott, 146-160.
- 2016. “Romance and Realism.” Oxford History of the Novel in English. Volume 11: The Novel in Africa and the Caribbean since 1950, ed. Simon Gikandi.Oxford University Press, 301-315.
- 2016. “African American Literature, Criticism, and Theory.” The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies, eds. Sangeeta Ray, Henry Schwarz, José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, Alberto Moreiras, and April Shemak. Blackwell.
- 2015. “Gender and Geomodernisms” Cambridge Companion to the American Modernist Novel, ed. Joshua Miller. Cambridge University Press, 89-105.
- 2014. “A Deep Humanness, A Deep Grace.” Interview with Chris Abani, Research in African Literatures 45.3: 227-240.
- 2014. “African Atrocity, American Humanity: Slavery and Its Transnational Afterlives,” Research in African Literatures. 45.3, 48-71.
- 2014. “Africa and the Black Atlantic,” Research in African Literatures. 45.3, v-xxv.
- 2014. “
- Black Nationalist Hokum: George Schuyler’s Transnational Critique
- .” African American Review. 47.1, 21-36.
- 2011. “The Pull of the Ancestors: Slavery, Apartheid, and Memory in Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying and Cion.” Research in African Literatures. 42.2, 147-169.
- 2010. “Towards and African Atlantic: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Diasporic Theater .” Atlantic Studies. 7.3, 241-261.
- 2006. “The Gender of Diaspora in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby. 52.2, 393-414.
- 2003. “Theorizing Africa in Black Diaspora Studies: Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies. 12.1, 5-38.
