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46 results

Page 1 of 3

  • Introduction

  • Edited by Yogita Goyal, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
    Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023, pp 1-28

  • Summary

    The Introduction provides an overview of the history, practice, and future directions of the field. It considers the coherence and stability of the category of contemporary African American literature, examines multiple genealogies and questions of periodization, and describes varied aesthetic practices of grief and grievance, experimentation and play. Embedding African American cultural production within the fraught history of the last five decades, this chapter examines various forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods.

The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature
  • Edited by Yogita Goyal
  • Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • African American literature has changed in startling ways since the end of the Black Arts Era. The last five decades have generated new paradigms of racial formation and novel patterns of cultural production, circulation, and reception. This volume takes up the challenge of mapping the varied and changing field of contemporary African American writing. Balancing the demands of historical and political context with attention to aesthetic innovation, it considers the history, practice, and future directions of the field. Examining various historical forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods, this Companion provides an invaluable point of reference for readers seeking rigorous and cutting-edge analyses of contemporary African American literature.

  • Chapter 6 - Afrofuturist Speculations and Diaspora

  • from Part I - Origins Revisited
  • Edited by Angela Naimou, Clemson University, South Carolina
  • Book:
    Diaspora and Literary Studies
    Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023, pp 112-126

  • Summary

    This chapter argues that it is difficult to think about Afrofuturism without considering diaspora. At the same time, it shows how speculative writing reimagines diasporic paradigms derived from historical trauma. It begins with the search for an alternative epistemology in early twentieth-century African American speculative writing, where a turn to an African utopia promises relief from anti-Black historical violence, figured as the healing of a scattered Black family reunited after a long estrangement. Such diasporic fantasies are frequently challenged by African thinkers, who refuse to let their homelands become fodder for imaginative projection alone and underscore fractures in transnational encounters. Tracing the flourishing of Afrofuturist paradigms since the 1990s, devoted to visions of a future where race neither magically disappears nor becomes all-encompassing, this chapter identifies currents of alienation and prophecy, dismemberment and remixing in a range of Afrofuturist projects, ending with the recent boom in African-centered perspectives.

  • 1 - The US and Geomodernism

  • from Part I - Methodologies
  • Edited by Mark Whalan, University of Oregon
  • Book:
    The Cambridge History of American Modernism
    Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    20 July 2023, pp 33-47

  • Summary

    Geomodernism insists that we cannot theorize modernist art within a national frame, emphasizing embeddedness and interconnection over isolation. Doing so requires reckoning with how questions of race and citizenship, migration and war, empire and revolution change our assessment of the aesthetics and politics of modernism. I begin with a call for a clearer sense of the relations among geomodernisms, global modernisms, and postcoloniality to suggest that US modernist studies could subtend geomodernist emphasis on place further by harnessing the insights of ethnic and postcolonial studies more fully. The global can neither be assumed as inert fact or impossible aspiration. Drawing on Eric Walrond’s Tropic Death (1926), I argue for a more robust focus on decolonial practice, on border as method, and on the ongoing racial violence of a settler state to highlight the unresolved presence of US empire and extraction in the hemisphere alongside submerged histories of labor migration.

  • National Allegory and Beyond: Postcolonial Critique Now

  • Yogita Goyal
  • Journal:
    PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 137 / Issue 3 / May 2022
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    28 July 2022, pp. 521-528
    Print publication:
    May 2022
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  • Un-American: Refugees and the Vietnam War

  • Yogita Goyal
  • Journal:
    PMLA / Publications of the Modern Language Association of America / Volume 133 / Issue 2 / March 2018
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    23 October 2020, pp. 378-383
    Print publication:
    March 2018

  • Viet thanh nguyen always insists that he is a refugee, not an immigrant, and that his novel the sympathizer is a war novel rather than an immigrant story (“Viet Thanh Nguyen”). In an era when the refugee has become the epicenter of debates about extreme nationalism and closed borders, the distinction between refugee and immigrant demands further parsing. Nguyen states the difference clearly when he contrasts the refugee, rendered stateless and vulnerable by persecution or catastrophe, to the immigrant, whose mobility reaffirms existing narratives of bounded territories. “Immigrant studies,” he writes, “affirms the nation-states the immigrant comes from and settles into; refugee studies brings into question the viability of the nation- state” (“Refugee Memories” 930).

  • The Genres of Guantánamo Diary: Postcolonial Reading and the War on Terror

  • Yogita Goyal
  • Journal:
    Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry / Volume 4 / Issue 1 / January 2017
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    15 February 2017, pp. 69-87

  • This essay reads Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary (2015) as an exemplary occasion to stage the dilemmas of postcolonial reading in the present, especially in relation to the global War on Terror declared by the United States after the 9/11 attacks. Reading Guantánamo Diary in relation to a genre it clearly seems to echo—the African American slave narrative—the essay argues that the analogy to slavery enables a deeper sense of the multiple and overlapping histories of race and empire but also obscures the transnational geography of detention signaled by Slahi as well as his damning comment on the failed project of postcolonial sovereignty. Showing how attention to questions of genre and their circulation across the globe illuminates the politics of terror and detention, the essay elaborates the possible ethics and aesthetics of postcolonial reading in the present.

The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature
  • Edited by Yogita Goyal
  • Published online:
    25 March 2017
    Print publication:
    13 February 2017
  • For two decades, the 'transnational turn' in literary studies has generated enormous comment and controversy. This Companion provides a comprehensive account of the scope, impact, and critical possibilities of the transnational turn in American literary studies. It situates the study of American literature in relation to ethnic, postcolonial, and hemispheric studies. Leading scholars open up wide-ranging examinations of transnationalism in American literature - through form and aesthetics, theories of nation, gender, sexuality, religion, and race, as well as through conventional forms of historical periodization. Offering a new map of American literature in the global era, this volume provides a history of the field, key debates, and instances of literary readings that convey the way in which transnationalism may be seen as a method, not just a description of literary work that engages more than one nation. Contributors identify the key modes by which writers have responded to major historical, political, and ethical issues prompted by the globalization of literary studies.

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