Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood by Angela Naimou (review)

Angela Naimou's Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood develops a method of reading contemporary aesthetic practices of the Americas as a response to current and past forms of legal personhood. Tracing the remnants of past legal categories among the subjectivities presented in the legal, literary, and visual imaginations of the United States and the Caribbean, Naimou offers a provocative response to current "death-bound" theories of human rights and the law, or approaches that focus on the irrecoverability of the archive of slavery, to advocate for new languages with which to engage ethically with the different legal masks through which human beings are either sheltered or excluded from the legal, economic, and political apparatuses of the contemporary world. Through highly contextualized readings of a varied corpus of literary works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including novels, short stories, and poems such as Edwidge Danticat's "A Wall of Fire Rising," Gayl Jones's Song for Anninho, and John Edgar Wideman's Fanon, Naimou provides us with promising ethically engaged approaches that are of great relevance to literary, legal, postcolonial, trans-American, and global scholarship alike.

Salvage Work is invested in disentangling the legacies of the archive of slavery in contemporary forms of personhood that on the surface would seem unrelated to race dynamics. Bringing together postcolonial theories such as Ann Laura Stoler's Imperial Debris, the legal scholarship in Colin Dayan's The Law is a White Dog, and Saidiya Hartman's work on Black Atlantic Studies, Naimou contributes to contemporary critiques of the liberalist claim to equal protection through the law's granting of universal rights by exploring contemporary legal personalities that are precisely excluded from any form of protection. Through provocative critiques of theories such as Orlando Patterson's social death and Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer, Naimou exposes the limitations of what she terms the "death-bound paradigms" (27), which finding "the figure of death always already constituted by sovereignty," leaves the human being "inevitably lost to the apocalyptic deathworlds of the biopolitical" (43). While acknowledging the relevance of these theories to expose the inadequacy of citizenship and human rights laws to "ensure the dignity and rights of all human lives" (142), Naimou's critique offers new starting points from which we can begin to address legal constructions and their consequences with more adequate vocabularies.

Naimou's countering of the claims to progress that relegate slavery to an exceptional past is carried out with a clever deploy of a language of ruination through which the "legal debris" of juridical subjectivities get "scavenged" and reassembled into the contemporary masks of personhood that turn stateless human beings into the "wasted, disposable, bare, dead in law […] ruined, junked, and trashed" (9). The legal racial slave, Naimou eloquently demonstrates, acts as a "productive site of ruin" (7) for the contemporary legal and literary imagination of the United States and the Caribbean. The novelty of Salvage Work, however, lies in Naimou's remarkable effort to move beyond such a language of ruination, the rhetoric of "wasted lives" that, as she explains, too frequently informs current discourses of human rights and legal personhood in academic and public debates.

To encounter a new poetics of legal personhood, Naimou turns to contemporary aesthetic practices that show an ethical engagement with the lacunae of the archives of slavery. Throughout the volume's two parts, "Legal Debris" and "Salvage Work," and her nuanced readings of works by African American, Latino/a, and Caribbean writers, Naimou conceptualizes "salvage" as a critical aesthetics that "contends with the often-spectral afterlives of legal cultures and provides alternative visions for the ethics and poetics of personhood" (24). Manifesting "the historicity of junked objects and ostensibly junked legal categories" (24), the aesthetics explored in Salvage Work propose an exposure of the mechanisms that reassemble legal ruins from the past as they intersect...