Human Shields and the Politics of Humanity

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. It is a real pleasure to comment on this excellent book on the history, law, and politics of human shields. Throughout the book, Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini argue that the human shield brings into relief many of the political and social dynamics of our societies. The book throws light on a humanity that is always internally-riven and hierarchically-ordered. Humans, the Continue reading →

A Commentary on Human Shields: A History of People in the Line of Fire

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. A few minutes before midnight on May 1, 2011, President Barak Obama went on television to announce that the nation’s most wanted man was dead. Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, who orchestrated the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 that killed almost three thousand people, now lay in a watery grave in an undisclosed location. “Justice has been done,” Obama said. Continue reading →

Responding to the Symposium

This essay is part of a symposium on Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini’s Human Shields. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. We are honoured by Noura Erakat’s, Lisa Hajjar’s, Pablo Kalmanovitz’s, Karin Loevy’s, Jessica Whyte’s, and Maja Zehfuss’s engagement with our book. We would like to begin by thanking them all for taking the time to read the manuscript and for offering really insightful criticism which has, in many respects, helped us to further articulate the book’s arguments. Noura Erakat asks why Continue reading →

Captivating Genres

This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In his now classic essay published in NLH in 1976, “The Origin of Genres,” Tzvetan Todorov famously articulated the following: “It is because genres exist as an institution that they function as ‘horizons of expectation’ for readers, and as ‘models of writing’ for authors.” He goes on to argue that “Genres communicate with the society in which they flourish by means of institutionalization,” and Continue reading →

Thinking with Runaway Genres about Runaway Movements and Falling Monuments

This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Which forms are most amenable for narrating the afterlives of slavery and why? Which configurations of race and power come to the fore and which recede when contemporary Afro-diasporic writers take up the slave narrative to address contemporary human-rights violations in Africa? What happens to the mutually constitutive relationship between race and form across different spaces and times? These are the questions that animate Continue reading →

“It’s All Happening at Once”: Jesmyn Ward’s Post-National Black Fiction

This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. And how could I conceive that Parchman was past, present, and future all at once? That the history and sentiment that carved the place out of the wilderness would show me that time is a vast ocean, and that everything is happening at once? Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing[2]   “It’s all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. Jesmyn Continue reading →

The Most Magnificent Drama in the Last Thousand Years of Human History: Notes on Cinematic Slavery

This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery, Yogita Goyal traces the translation of sentimental narrative structures and tropes from nineteenth-century slave narratives to contemporary narrative accounts of human rights abuses and the global (re)production of race. “In exploring the contradictory uses of historical violence for contemporary politics,” she argues, “we need to not only return to the question of what slavery itself means Continue reading →

Unsentimental Globalism

This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Every great book has its shadow books. Sometimes we sense them as the submerged iceberg of all the research that stands behind but does not get integrated into the text at hand; sometimes they linger like a specter of paths-not-taken in the book’s long gestation; and sometimes they are the imaginary book that we begin to conceptualize under the tutelage of the book we Continue reading →

Response to Runaway Genres

This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. In its dynamic charting of the American slave narrative’s multi-pronged evolution, Runaway Genres could easily expand in any number of further directions. Most would pursue American and markedly “global” modes of expression; writing, that is, that bears a clear transatlantic imprint, even where it is best described as sidestepping or rejecting transatlanticism’s primacy in thinking through Black self-formations. As Goyal’s book shows, the sheer Continue reading →

Runaway Genres: On Slavery, Captivity, and Blackness Now

This essay is part of a symposium on Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres. All contributions to the symposium can be found here. Yogita Goyal’s Runaway Genres: The Global Afterlives of Slavery examines the emergence of “slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood in order to rethink race in a global frame” (2). The book thus concerns itself with the implications of new definitions of slavery and Blackness for American publics. Specifically, Yogita Goyal rethinks current literary frameworks for Continue reading →