The cover of Francisco Goldman’sThe Ordinary Seaman(1997) features the image of a massive cargo ship as it looms above three minuscule human figures in silhouette. From the photographer Sebastião Salgado’s Workers:An Archaeology of the Industrial Age,the image is one of a series of photographs that document the ship-breaking industry, which, Salgado informs us, has waned over the course of the 1980s due to the rising costs of demolition.¹ Hailed by Gabriel García Márquez as “the photography of humanity,” Workers is vast: it includes three hundred fifty large duotone photographs of laborers from twenty-six countries in an...

Among the crumbling industrial sites of the Brooklyn waterfront sits the vast Domino Sugar Factory refinery complex. Completely rebuilt and expanded after an 1882 fire destroyed the original Williamsburg factory, the new refinery was touted as the largest on the planet, capable of producing 1,250,000 pounds of sugar daily.¹ Between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, the American Sugar Refining Company rose to become a key player in industrializing the international sugar trade and bringing it to Brooklyn. The Domino Sugar Factory employed thousands of immigrants, pulled shiploads of raw sugar from the Caribbean into the Port of New...

Emphasizing the power of sovereign law to adjudicate and recognize certain forms of human life as excluded from the body politic, death-bound theories of personhood provide influential paradigms for explaining why and how citizenship and international human rights law fail to ensure the dignity and rights of all human lives. These theories take seemingly exceptional categories of the legal person—slave, prisoner, fugitive, stateless refugee, de facto stateless person, undocumented alien, all of which bar persons from full participation in political life—to represent the normal institutional operations of law. Death-bound paradigms reveal that the ideal abstract citizen figure that...

John Edgar Wideman’s 2008 novel,Fanon,finds its genesis, according to Wideman’s self-named writer-narrator John, in a remembered image of Frantz Fanon’s face under erasure.

I encountered your stenciled, spray-painted image, an image like my project, almost effaced, so I didn’t recognize you until two days after you popped up in the middle of nowhere, a field where cows grazed near the beach.¹

A fugitive image, Fanon’s face surprises John as all the more present for being barely there. Fanon’s image is spray-painted on the “concrete minibunker” of an energy company supplying electricity to the tourist section of Martinique, a...

To make the dead “act, speak, answer as is our wont”: beyond the rhetorical power it grants the writer—a power Wideman performatively struggles to claim throughoutFanon—prosopopoeia may also evoke the desire not to speak for but to recover the voices lost to the archives of Atlantic slavery, to have through literature a form that, like cinema, “animates the dead, revives dead images of things, the images people and all other things discard” (194). It evokes the related promise to jumpstart the narrative failure Saidiya Hartman laments in her inability to find a mode for telling the story...