Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery

NYU Press, 2019.

Winner of the 2021 Perkins Prize, awarded by the International Society for the Study of Narrative

Honorable Mention, 2020 James Russell Lowell Prize, awarded by MLA

Winner of the René Wellek Prize, awarded by ACLA

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Runaway Genres: Global Afterlives of Slavery (NYU 2019) tracks the emergence of Atlantic slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. While Toni Morrison rightly lamented the lack of any suitable memorial to slavery in the U.S. (not even a bench by the road) some twenty-five years ago, we now live in an era where slavery is seemingly everywhere: a fit subject for solemn memorials, irreverent comedy, imaginative reconstruction, an allegory of contemporary racial politics, or an enterprise of painstaking fact-finding for historians. 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.

I locate this global proliferation at the confluence of three forces: increasing large-scale migration, the ongoing appeal of sentimentalism as a vehicle to narrate trauma, and a historical tendency to see current events as repetitions of the past. The transformation of the slave narrative as a new world literary genre illuminates the ethics and aesthetics of globalism, restoring to the center of our attention the voices of the most marginalized figures of our world: the child soldier, the victim of human trafficking, the refugee, and the detainee. Taking form seriously in discussions of minority literature, I organize each chapter around a genre associated with the slave narrative–sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman. 

Runaway Genres begins with the most literal return to slavery–the phenomenon of modern slavery characterized by what I term sentimental globalism. Each chapter moves further away from this neo-abolitionist template, both in terms of insisting on a literal repetition of slavery as opposed to more oblique or metaphoric returns, and in its distance from sentimentalism as the guiding force for generating empathy, activism, and a sense of relation across the world. 

For a world connected like never before, my wide-ranging book answers some basic questions: who writes for whom, how and why do people in the First World react to tales of suffering from far away, and how do conceptions of race developed in the U.S. fare in an increasingly transnational context? Showing how slavery provides the occasion not just for revisiting the Atlantic past but for renarrating the global present, Runaway Genres creates a timely new map of contemporary Black diaspora literature, reading the work of such celebrated writers as Chris Abani, Chimamanda Adichie, Ishmael Beah, Paul Beatty, Octavia Butler, Teju Cole, Dinaw Mengestu, Toni Morrison, and Colson Whitehead. Attentive to literary texture, nuanced in its treatment of racial and postcolonial politics, and deeply invested in the particular histories that generate these narratives, the book bridges African American, American, Global, and Postcolonial Studies, challenging the boundaries and forms of each field.

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature

Cambridge Press, 2010.

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Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge UP, 2010), situates Africa at the center of aesthetic inquiry that takes place in the wider Black Atlantic, rather than its forgotten past or as the dark continent of colonial fantasy. Shifting the center of Black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of Black modernity, the book shows that writers like Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Joseph Casely Hayford, Richard Wright, Chinua Achebe, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Caryl Phillips construct a romance of diaspora in their efforts to imagine alternate political futures.

Seeking to historicize the many uses of Africa as geopolitical space and often fantastical construct, the book maps 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. Inspired by the efforts to connect decolonization movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean to anti-racist struggles in the United States, my exploration of a utopian black modernity that fused nationalist and transnationalist aspirations taps into the promise of what has come to be known as the Bandung moment, offering an anatomy of its pre-history as well as a prognosis of its ongoing afterlife.

Reading romance in dialectical tension with realism, I show how shifts in genre map partitions of time and space, modernity and tradition, and national and transnational affiliations. Thinking of genre as the presence of the past in the present, my study highlights constant transformation, as earlier forms are constantly returning, being displaced, inverted, or reproduced. I argue that oppositions between nation and diaspora cannot capture the nuances of ideas about the charged signs of Africa or the West, which is why situating diaspora as a counter to Black nationalism, rather than engaged in a supple dialogue with it, cannot do justice to the history of intellectual exchange across the Black Atlantic. As specific kinds of representational acts, and also as ways of conceptualizing the world, black Atlantic literature’s shifts between the genres of realism and romance call for a nuanced analysis of the cultural contradictions being mapped and managed therein. In this way, the book attempts to treat literary style politically, as a supple and disputed concept within twentieth-century black culture, by replacing static models of racial identity formation and national formation with more flexible, more dynamic ones of migration, circulation, and entanglement.

In tracking the history of a genre, I call attention to the way in which genres exist in time, and so provide a means of reviving a kind of historical thinking, in order to stress the relationship between cultural texts located in different times and places. Each writer I look at remakes the form so that it will be adequate to a changing experience of modernity.  In addition to offering new ways to read the place of Africa, then, my study of black Atlantic literature also aims to alter our understanding of how these writers use diverse narrative forms to make sense of – indeed, to make – our world.