Salvage Work examines contemporary literary responses to the law's
construction of personhood in the Americas. Tracking the
extraordinary afterlives of the legal slave personality from the
nineteenth century into the twenty-first, Angela Naimou shows the
legal slave to be a fractured but generative figure for
contemporary legal personhood across categories of race,
citizenship, gender, and labor. What emerges is a compelling and
original study of how law invents categories of identification and
how literature contends with the person as a legal fiction. Through
readings of Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman, Edwidge
Danticat's Krik?Krak!, Rosario Ferre's Sweet Diamond Dust (Maldito
Amor), Gayl Jones's Song for Anninho and Mosquito, and John Edgar
Wideman's Fanon, Naimou shows how literary engagements with legal
personhood reconfigure formal narrative conventions in Black
Atlantic historiography, the immigrant novel, the anticolonial
romance, the trope of the talking book, and the bildungsroman.
Revealing links between colonial, civic, slave, labor, immigration,
and penal law, Salvage Work reframes debates over civil and human
rights by revealing the shared hemispheric histories and effects of
legal personhood across seemingly disparate identities-including
the human and the corporate person, the political refugee and the
economic migrant, and the stateless person and the citizen. In
depicting the material remains of the legal slave personality in
the de-industrialized neoliberal era, these literary texts develop
a salvage aesthetic that invites us to rethink our political and
aesthetic imagination of personhood. Questioning liberal frameworks
for civil and human rights as well as what Naimou calls death-bound
theories of personhood-in which forms of human life are primarily
described as wasted, disposable, bare, or dead in law-Salvage Work
thus responds to critical discussions of biopolitics and neoliberal
globalization by exploring the potential for contemporary
literature to reclaim the individual from the legal regimes that
have marked her.
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