Rethinking Freedom: Slavery, Time, and Affect in the Global Novel

Abstract

Even before the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s murder in 2020, Yogita Goyal’s erudite and nuanced study of “the global afterlives of slavery” would have been acclaimed as an important academic book. But in the months (and now years) that have followed, the work has come to seem even more important and urgent. It opens, after all, with a consideration of memorialization and monuments, which have become such an important point of contestation in the U.S. Specifically, Goyal cites Toni Morrison, whose enormously influential Beloved was shaped by the novelist’s deep regret that there was “no suitable memorial” to the slave experience: not a “plaque or wreath or threehundredfoot tower,” not even a “small bench by the road” (1). Goyal uses this poignant starting point to comment on the massive body of literature about the slave experience that has arisen since the publication of Beloved in 1987. Whether in forms that replicate those of the nineteenthcentury slave narrative or those that break with its tropes and structures of feeling, the remembrance of slavery has radically shaped contemporary writing in the U.S. and beyond over the past three decades. And yet, Morrison’s lament over inadequate public memorialization still seemed completely apt and timely in the last years of the Trump presidency,