Description
Book SynopsisA study of post-1980 US and Caribbean literary responses to legal personhood. Analyzes literature by Francisco Goldman, Edwidge Danticat, Rosario Ferré, Gayl Jones, and John Edgar Wideman, which depict the legal slave as a generative legal category for labor, immigration, and human rights issues into the twenty-first century.
Trade Review"Salvage Work is a thoughtful and timely exploration of the historical, ideological, and political significance of legal personhood in very contemporary fiction. Salvage Work is a wonderful incorporation of a deep body of legal history ... moving away from purely 'cultural' definitions and recognizable political trajectories and toward a complicated reading of identity." -- -Samantha Pinto Georgetown University "Salvage Work is a unique and exciting study that engages with a variety of disciplines, including American studies, Caribbean studies, and postcolonial studies. This is a beautifully written book that offers astute, nuanced close readings of the literary works that expose the critical intersections between law, empire, personhood, and literature." -- -April Shemak Sam Houston State University "Angela Naimou's superbly written Salvage Work is one of the smartest responses to Giorgio Agamben's 'death-bound theories of legal personhood.' Rather than take the refugee as the singular figure for theorizing the limits of sovereignty and the subject of law, Naimou studies the disruptions to a liberal rights paradigm through her focus on equally troubling cases of exceptional personhood in the figures of, among others, the slave, the disappeared, the corporation, the sailor, the fugitive, and the fetus. The legal and political insights are all the more powerful because they emerge from meticulous close readings of U.S. and Caribbean fiction, reminding us of just how much the world needs humanities-based and literary thinking if we are to tackle the most important problems of our time in their full weight and complexity." -- -Joseph R. Slaughter Columbia University
Table of ContentsContents Introduction: Contemporary Literature and the Legal Person 1 Part I: Legal Debris 1. The Free, the Slave, and the Disappeared: States and Sites of Exceptional Personhood in Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman 000 2. Sugar's Legacies: Romance, Revolution, and Wageless Life in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat and Rosario Ferre 000 Part II: Salvage Aesthetics 3. Fugitive Personhood: Re-Imagining Sanctuary in Gayl Jones's Song For Anninho and Mosquito 000 4. Masking Fanon 000 Epilogue: Personhood at Its Limits: The Animal, the Fetus, and the Stateless Person 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000
