The Remains of Empire and Slavery

A growing number of recent publications by scholars of literature and culture have sought to trace genealogies of modern liberalism and offer Foucauldian “histories of the present” that render newly visible the long afterlives of colonial conquest, racial slavery, and compulsory capitalist development well after these phenomena have been declared things of the past. Angela Naimou’s Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood offers a welcome addition to this important body of scholarship. Taking as its central analytic the “legal racial slave” and the colonized subject (2), and bringing together political and legal theories of personhood with literary narratives and visual cultures, Naimou recovers that which remains from imperial and nationalist projects to haunt the United States and Caribbean nations, proposing that “[w]here there is ruin, there has always been its salvaging” (8).

Readers already well-versed in critical approaches to law and culture know that there is nothing “natural” and universal about the personhood and rights of human beings. Rather, legal status and the enjoyment of rights is a construction that has varied over time and space, contracting as well as expanding according to the particular contexts and social orders in which the law is situated. Salvage Work shares with other critical work in American and postcolonial studies a concern for evincing the conditions that have given rise to our contemporary concepts of citizenship and rights, as well as, conversely, legal and political exclusion and varieties of “social death” (20). In broad terms, this scholarship has tended to cluster around two sets of research questions. First, literary studies such as Joseph Slaughter’s Human Rights, Inc. and Elizabeth Anker’s Fictions of Dignity have investigated how narrative genres such as the Bildungsroman and the world novel stabilize and naturalize human personhood for the law (even when, as in Anker’s case, those narratives function to “flesh” out the human person beyond the flat character to which abstract personhood seems bound).¹ Second, the political and social theories of Giorgio Agamben, along with cultural criticism that has been called “Afro-pessimism” (for example, the work of Orlando Patterson and Saidiya Hartman), illuminate how liberal efforts of incorporation necessarily enact the violent production of a shadowy, disavowed exterior to such categories of belonging. These “death-bound theories” (18), as Naimou concisely formulates these paradigms, demonstrate the ways in which lived experiences of unfreedom have never been simple or accidental exceptions to modern legal and social personhood. Instead, apparently anomalous kinds of subjects—for example, refugees—have in fact been constitutive of sanctioned legal personhood. Accordingly, millions of human beings have found themselves caught in legal limbo, recognized by the law only to the extent that they have been branded, in their physical, social, and cultural aspects, as excludable. While both of these approaches have been absolutely essential to understanding how “[t]he language of liberal democratic rights and international human rights paradoxically creates the gap between person and human in order to disavow it” (19), they also have the tendency to accord to the law the first and final word on how life is authorized, experienced, and valued.

In contrast, by attending to abjected remains of legal personhood—those such as the legal slave who have been, in the Foucauldian conception, “allowed” to die, or who have been aggressively discarded in legal acts of incorporation—Salvage Work sidesteps much of the critical melancholy that often characterizes death-bound paradigms. By way of a “salvage aesthetics” (9), Naimou sets out to demonstrate how the contradictions of legal incorporation also live on in creative forms into the present moment, generating animated, vibrant subjects of their own. Thus, as she explains, there exist competing modes of economic, political, and social salvage work. For example, legal precedent proves a kind of official salvage work, wherein courts make usable past practices that can accord with their present interests or purposes, in the process generating the legal authority...