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.