Graduate English Speaker Series: Professor Yogita Goyal

Talk Title: Late Style and the Postcolonial Novel

Professor Goyal’s lecture takes up a group of celebrated twenty-first century novels by African diaspora writers NoViolet Bulawayo, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Maaza Mengiste, and Imbolo Mbue. In novels like Glory, The Mournable Body, The Shadow King, and How Beautiful We Were, these writers return to the language of revolution from a previous cycle of African fiction – the nation-building moment after decolonization of the 1960s and 1970s. They seek to recreate the space of collective struggle and to recover historical memory in exactly the same way as their predecessors, often recuperating symbols like the flag, the anthem, and the martyred body that attended the first moment of national liberation. Professor Goyal’s talk considers what this desire to salvage revolutionary politics in an era marked by crisis and catastrophe portends for the study of postcolonial fiction. Doing so helps Goyal to theorize how anticolonialism comes into the present and to track various forms of distortion and disavowal.

Speaker Biography

Yogita Goyal (she/her) is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA and author of Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (2010) and Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery (2019), winner of the René Wellek and Perkins Prizes. She has published widely on African diaspora, postcolonial, and US literature, and served as President of A.S.A.P. and editor of the journal, Contemporary Literature. Most recently, she edited The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature (2023) and joined the American Literary History editorial team. Her current monograph, “Anticolonialism, Lost and Found,” takes up mid-twentieth century anticolonial thought and its current revival.

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