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 with notions of race, labor, sexuality, migration, and citizenship, and as they “develop, morph, pass out of or remain spectrally within the public record” (42). Such practices, Naimou argues, rather than responding to the “economy of newness of recycling,” give the traces of legal personhood “new values and new functions without removing the traces of ruination” (24). As an ethics, Naimou contends, salvage does not attempt to humanize or victimize the law's trashed subjects, but to provide avenues for struggle without erasing “the discursive and physical violence generated by the fiction of legal personhood itself” (42). Thus, Naimou's compelling formulation of salvage aesthetics reveals sites of resistance that challenge us to ethically conceptualize the legal masks assigned to contemporary subjects and elaborate a poetics of reappropriation by bringing to the fore the legal fragments that are enforced through such masks.The volume's four chapters operate at two different levels that answer two core considerations of Naimou's project. The first question concerns the processes through which the law enables the varied “afterlives” of slavery in current legal constructions. Naimou's selection of primary texts serves the purpose of illustrating the different forms of legal personality that are assembled from the fragments of slavery. For example, in Chapter 1, Naimou's reading of Francisco Goldman's The Ordinary Seaman explores how maritime law enabled the construction of the undocumented laborer and the “illegal alien” as an assemblage “between recognized legal identities (citizen, seaman) and legal identities that have ostensibly been abolished (slave, indentured laborer, victim of human trafficking)” (55). Under the same light, Chapter 2 traces the legacies of the sugar plantation after the Haitian Revolution through Danticat's “A Wall of Fire Rising” and Puerto Rico's incorporation of antiprostitution laws aimed at women of color through Rosario Ferré's Sweet Diamond Dust; Chapter 3 examines the currency of the fugitive slave in Central American personalities of the refugee via the creative marronage of Caryl Jones's poetry and fiction; Chapter 4 addresses all of these through an explicit presentation of the legal mask as an assemblage of fragments in Wideman's Fanon. In this process, Naimou develops a cohesive genealogy of the diverse sites haunted by the legal racial slave and effectively demonstrates its pertinence to explorations of contemporary juridical subjectivities.The second question that the chapters of Salvage Work elucidate concerns the narrative strategies that contemporary authors have employed to narrate forms of personality that remain outside the bounds of legal and narratorial representation. The narratives that Naimou examines often inscribe themselves in traditional genres such as the immigrant novel, the bildungsroman, and the romance novel to complicate their rhetoric of unencumbered incorporation of the individual into society or the successful union of legacies into a totalized national narrative. Tracing connections between these novelistic structures and the processes of incorporation of ideal subjects into a legal system (206), Salvage Work explores how contemporary literary works reconfigure such genres as they evince the impossibility of a lineal, unified, and uninterrupted completion of their traditional teleological plot lines. Naimou particularly illustrates this through her reading of the perpetual rehearsals of history in “A Wall of Fire Rising,” as well as in the narrative false starts found in Wideman's Fanon. Closing the volume, Naimou's analysis of Wideman's novel shows how the realization of narrative failure gives rise to a different kind of aesthetics. Facing the impossibility of writing a coming-of-age novel based on Fanon, the narrator resorts to “refashion personhood as a highly constructed, artificial mask that enables the wearer to evade or exceed the law's defining masks” (185). Through Wideman's deploy of what Naimou identifies as an aesthetics of collage, she persuasively presents the possibility of imagining personhood in a manner that can expose the constructedness of all masks while providing a space for imagining ways of nonnormative self-definition.Salvage Work mirrors the literary narratives it explores in that it engages conscientiously and ethically with the material realities that surround all of the “trashed” legal personae that it examines. Throughout her readings, Naimou demonstrates the importance of reading contextually and attending to the specificities of each experience when exploring the violence and exploitation that is enforced by different legal, economic, political, and national apparatuses. In her genealogies of contemporary legal personae, Naimou effectively shows how the legal construction of slavery is still of utmost relevance when examining forms of exclusion in the Americas. Additionally, Naimou's conceptualization of salvage aesthetics provides an innovative language with which to find creative sites from which we can at least complicate the assumptions that equate legal personalities with subjective self-definition. Salvage Work does not conceptualize naive forms of liberation. Rather, it provides new ground from which we can begin to rethink the legal identities that we wear.