African Atrocity, American Humanity

Slavery and Its Transnational Afterlives

Dados Bibliográficos

ID9250396
AutoresYogita Goyal (0000-0002-5248-3513, University of California, Los Angeles, autor correspondente), Goyal Goyal
Ano2014
Volume45
Fascículo3
Páginas48
Data de publicação2014-01-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoResearch in African Literatures (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0034-5210 • E-ISSN: 1527-2044
EditoraIndiana University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.2979/reseafrilite.45.3.48
OpenAlexW2078113497
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas6
Referências citadas31

This essay argues that contemporary American conceptions of African atrocity are haunted by the specter of slavery, which structures the ways in which a relation between the United States and Africa is imagined. Francis Bok's memoir, Escape from Slavery (2003), and Dave Eggers's novel What Is the What (2006) reveal the stakes of this literary haunting, where the canonical Atlantic genre of the antebellum slave narrative is called into play to narrate contemporary Sudanese stories, thus refashioning the politics of race and diaspora for a neoliberal age. Reading for the formal and ideological exchanges between subject, author, and amanuensis, the essay shows how the discourse of modern slavery relies on sentimental humanism to generate a seemingly new way for Americans to imagine themselves as global citizens, constituting themselves as global via their humanitarian empathy for the African victim of atrocity

Crimes against humanity · Criminology · Humanity · International law · Political science · Sociology · War crime · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society