About

Yogita Goyal is Professor of African American Studies and English at UCLA, focusing on African diaspora, postcolonial, and U.S. literature. Her research explores the aesthetics of refuge in twenty-first-century refugee literature and culture, as well as the revival of mid-twentieth-century anticolonial thought. She has authored two monographs and edited several special issues and companions.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Philosophy
• History
• Art history
• Art
• Law
• Aesthetics
• Linguistics

Selected publications

• The Work of Literature in the Age of the Refugee

  American Literary History · 2024-03-11

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This essay considers the specific challenges that attend the study of the figure of the refugee, probing the valence of historical and geopolitical comparison alongside the limits and possibilities of literary methods. Considering recent books on the literature of migration, the essay examines the aftermath of twentieth-century wars in Asian American, Caribbean, Latinx, and US literary criticism.

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-14

  paratext1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Mapping New Identities and Geographies

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Cambridge Companions To …

  2023-12-14

  other1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Histories of the Present

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Critical Approaches

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Chronology

  2023-12-14

  other1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Afrofuturist Speculations and Diaspora

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-07-20

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter argues that it is difficult to think about Afrofuturism without considering diaspora. At the same time, it shows how speculative writing reimagines diasporic paradigms derived from historical trauma. It begins with the search for an alternative epistemology in early twentieth-century African American speculative writing, where a turn to an African utopia promises relief from anti-Black historical violence, figured as the healing of a scattered Black family reunited after a long estrangement. Such diasporic fantasies are frequently challenged by African thinkers, who refuse to let their homelands become fodder for imaginative projection alone and underscore fractures in transnational encounters. Tracing the flourishing of Afrofuturist paradigms since the 1990s, devoted to visions of a future where race neither magically disappears nor becomes all-encompassing, this chapter identifies currents of alienation and prophecy, dismemberment and remixing in a range of Afrofuturist projects, ending with the recent boom in African-centered perspectives.

  PublisherDOI

• African American Genres

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-12-14

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The Introduction provides an overview of the history, practice, and future directions of the field. It considers the coherence and stability of the category of contemporary African American literature, examines multiple genealogies and questions of periodization, and describes varied aesthetic practices of grief and grievance, experimentation and play. Embedding African American cultural production within the fraught history of the last five decades, this chapter examines various forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nadia Ellis

  2 shared

• Kinohi Nishikawa

  2 shared

• Marisa Parham

  2 shared

• Rolland Murray

  2 shared

• Aida Levy-Hussen

  2 shared

• Madhu Dubey

  2 shared

• Derek C. Maus

  State University of New York at Potsdam

  2 shared

• Christopher Freeburg

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, English

  Brown University

  2003

Awards & honors

• René Wellek Prize from ACLA
• Perkins prize from the International Society for the Study o…
• Honorable Mention for the James Russell Lowell Prize from ML…