Title Salvage Work : U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood / Angela Naimou

Edition First edition Published New York : Fordham University Press, 2015

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Description 1 online resource Contents Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: Contemporary Literature and the Legal Person -- 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 -- 3. Fugitive Personhood: Reimagining Sanctuary in Gayl Jones's Song for Anninho and Mosquito -- 4. Masking Fanon -- Epilogue: The Ends of Legal Personhood -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index 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 contemporary literature to reclaim the individual from the legal regimes that have marked her"-- Provided by publisher Analysis Citizenship Francisco Goldman Gayl Jones Law and Literature Legal Personhood Postcolonial Ethnic Studies Rosario Ferré human rights neoliberalism race Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes Online resource; title from PDF title page (EBSCO, viewed February 13, 2015) Subject American literature -- History and criticism. Caribbean literature -- History and criticism Self in literature. Law and literature. Citizenship in literature. Human rights in literature. Juristic persons -- Moral and ethical aspects LITERARY CRITICISM -- American -- General. American literature Caribbean literature Citizenship in literature Human rights in literature Juristic persons -- Moral and ethical aspects Law and literature Self in literature Genre/Form Electronic books Criticism, interpretation, etc. Form Electronic book ISBN 9780823264780 0823264785 9780823264797 0823264793 0823264769 9780823264766 9780823266616 0823266613

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