Scholarship on Atlantic slavery has long considered the critical problem of the archive and the ethics of recuperating subjects concealed or erased by liberal and neoliberal discursive formations. Recent inquiries into the ethics of recovery have followed Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault in conceptualizing the archive as a space irredeemably fraught with absences. Other historical and literary treatments of slavery expound what might be described as an ethos of possibility. For scholars such as Saidiya Hartman the unbearable silences and violent erasures implicit in archives of slavery must not be left undisturbed, insisting that scholars must assume responsibility for interrogating the conditions of knowledge production itself.Footnote ¹ In Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood, Angela Naimou addresses what she calls “the afterlives” of the historical construct of the legal racial slave in order to examine the ways contemporary literature imaginatively tracks the slave-person's troubling legacies, here conceptualized as the “debris” of liberal legal personhood (8). Following Hartman, Naimou refutes conceptions of the archive as an emblem of impossible recovery, arguing that the imaginative turn to the slave past in US and Caribbean literature provides scope for reconceiving contemporary categories of legal personhood – “unstable composites” – as themselves a kind of repository (25).

Conceptually, there is much to like about Salvage Work. Whereas Giorgio Agamben's critique of liberal political philosophy and praxis dwells on the limits of sovereign personhood, Naimou is quick to point out that concepts of bare or naked life in fact place limitations on thought to the extent that they maintain the citizen as the central object of analysis. Naimou's theoretical question, then, is: “How does a theory of biopolitics change when it is not the rights of the citizen but the alienation of the slave or the colonized subject that is at the center of one's analysis?” (31). Following scholars such as Achille Mbembe and Colin Dayan, Naimou pursues a “differential logic of legal personhood” in order to underscore “the enormous range of particular legal identities” that lie between the figure of the ideal citizen and bare life (33).Footnote ² Emphasizing the urgency of overcoming so-called “death-bound” theories of personhood reveals how “a concern with the ‘detritus of lives’ leads to literary narrative tactics that repeatedly figure legal personhood as debris or in ruins, even as that ruination enables the aesthetic operations of salvage within narrative” (18).

The book's principal conceptual metaphor is itself striking. Combining legalistic and archaeological frames, the aesthetics of salvage draw on both the maritime figure of the salvor – “one who salvages, one who saves” – and processes of excavation and recuperation undertaken by salvage or rescue archaeologists (9, 56). Rather than staking claims to full recuperation, salvage operations constitute a “critical and creative practice” for apprehending the proliferation of identities that cannot be incorporated into the paradigm of ideal legal citizen. Naimou elaborates her analysis of salvage aesthetics through close consideration of US and Caribbean literature that variously responds to historically located legal taxonomies. Chapter 1 draws together two seafaring novels, Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman (1997) and Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855), to take an expansive look at maritime sites of exception. Chapter 2 turns to the sugar trade in Haiti and Puerto Rico and considers how two texts, Edwidge Danticat's short story “A Wall of Fire Rising” from Krik? Krak! (1996) and Rosario Ferre's Sweet Diamond Dust (1988), imaginatively respond to legal fictions passed down through generations that persist in shaping both social identity and material conditions. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on fugitivity and incarceration, tracing the narrational tactics deployed in the experimental works of Gayl Jones and John Edgar Wideman.

Salvage Work represents a timely contribution to a broader body of recent works seeking to extend critical discourse beyond the restrictive discursive perimeters of bare life. While Naimou acknowledges debts to Nicole Waligora-Davis, her work also echoes Alexander Wehelye's recent contributions to the field of black studies.Footnote ³ There are, for this reader, a couple of caveats. Given that the book purports to analyze the historical contours of law and the traces of past legal jurisprudence that remain today, Salvage Work might have done more to convincingly historicize its theoretical claims. Taking into account the historical conditions out of which the texts under consideration were produced would, perhaps, have led to a more nuanced analysis. Jodi Melamed's insights in Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (2011) about the “hegemonic complexes of official and state-recognized liberal antiracisms” of the late twentieth century are deeply instructive for scholars of recent and contemporary American literatures (quoted at xv). Nonetheless scholars in the field of American and Caribbean studies and postcolonial literary studies will likely find much to appreciate in the book's theoretical sophistication.