B.A. (Hons.), St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, 1995 Ph.D., Brown University, 2003

Interests

African American Literature, Black Atlantic/ Black Diaspora studies, Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Anglophone African literature, Transnational American studies, Novel, and Slavery studies.

Selected Publications

Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2010)

“The Gender of Diaspora in Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby” (Modern Fiction Studies, 2006)

“Theorizing Africa in Black Diaspora Studies: Caryl Phillips’s Crossing the River” (Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 2003)

Additional Information

Yogita Goyal’s research examines the literature of the African diaspora, with a particular focus on Anglophone African and African American literature.  Seeking to bridge distinct intellectual traditions, she has broad interests in transnationalism and globalization, anti-colonial and black nationalism, slavery, and the novel.  These interests are elaborated in her monograph, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature, an interdisciplinary treatment of modern black literature and cultural history, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press in April 2010.  The book seeks to rethink the terms of representing the African diaspora by providing a model for a comparative reading of the literatures produced in Africa, the Caribbean, the African American tradition and the spaces in between.  Shifting the center of black diaspora studies by considering Africa as constitutive of black modernity rather than its forgotten past, Goyal argues that it is through the literary figure of romance that the possibility of diaspora is imagined across time and space.  Reading romance in dialectical tension with realism, she shows how shifts in genre map partitions of time and space, modernity and tradition, and national and transnational affiliations in the works of major black writers, including Pauline Hopkins, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. Du Bois, Joseph Casely Hayford, Chinua Achebe, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, Ama Ata Aidoo, and Caryl Phillips. 

Her work has been supported by a University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities (2007-2008) and an NEH Fellowship as a Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library (2003-2004).  She teaches classes on a range of black diaspora literature, including Afro-American Literature since the 1960s, Black Autobiography, Modern African Novel, Neo-Slave Narratives of the African Diaspora, Slavery and Black Women Writers, Black Atlantic Travel Narratives, and Black British Fiction.  She is currently working on a comparative study of neo-slave narratives and post-apartheid fiction. 

 149 Humanities Building • Box 951530 • Los Angeles • CA 90095-1530
 Tel: 310.825.4173  Fax: 310.267.4339
 © 2008 UC Regents