Yogita Goyal

Professor, Department of African American Studies and Department of English

Yogita Goyal is Professor of English and African American Studies at UCLA. She is Editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature, for British and Anglophone Fiction, and Past President of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (A.S.A.P.). She specializes in modern and contemporary literature and the study of race and postcolonialism, with a particular emphasis on African American and African literature. Her 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. She is guest editor of a special issue of Research in African Literatures (2014) on “Africa and the Black Atlantic” and editor of the Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature (2017).

Goyal’s most recent book, Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery (NYU, 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 – this project reads 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. Taking form seriously in discussions of minority literature, the book examines key genres associated with the slave narrative: sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman. 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.

After studying in Tokyo and Delhi, Goyal received her Ph.D. from Brown University in 2003. Her 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 her 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. Goyal’s work has been supported by fellowships from the ACLS (2016-2017), the University of California President’s Office (2007-2008), and the NEH (Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, 2003-2004). She was Chair of the Publications Committee of the American Comparative Literature Association for 2015-2018, and served on the Founding Editorial Board of Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory. A member of the MLA Delegate Assembly from 2016-2019, she serves on the Executive Committee of the Postcolonial Studies Forum for 2018-2023 and the Advisory Council for the American Literature Society for 2018-2020. She regularly teaches 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 2019-2022. In 2019, she was Visiting Professor at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität, Berlin.

She is working on a monograph on twenty-first century refugee literature and culture, Aesthetics of Refuge, and editing The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature (contracted for 2022).