Salvage Work : U.S. and Caribbean literatures amid the debris of legal personhood / Angela Naimou.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Naimou, Angela, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Caribbean literature--History and criticism.

Caribbean literature.

Self in literature.

Law and literature.

Citizenship in literature.

Human rights in literature.

Juristic persons--Moral and ethical aspects.

Juristic persons.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xi, 291 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2015.

Summary:

"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 contem porary literature to reclaim the individual from the legal regimes that have marked her"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: Contemporary Literature and the Legal Person

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; 2. Sugar's Legacies: Romance, Revolution, and Wageless Life in the Fiction of Edwidge Danticat and Rosario Ferré

Part II. Salvage Aesthetics: 3. Fugitive Personhood: Reimagining Sanctuary in Gayl Jones's Song For Anninho and Mosquito; 4. Masking Fanon

Epilogue: The Ends of Legal Personhood.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 261-284) and index.

William Sanders Scarborough Prize, Honorable Mention, 2015

ISBN:

9780823264766

0823264769

OCLC:

898066527