Apr
24
The Genres of Slavery
This lecture tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template for understanding contemporary human rights abuses. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today — from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to conscription in war — Goyal will discuss how contemporary literature draws on the antebellum genre of the slave narrative, reinventing such key narrative tendencies as sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman.
Yogita Goyal is associate professor of English and African American studies at UCLA.