Angela Naimou's Salvage Work Receives Honorable Mention from MLA
By FUPress
12th December 2016
Salvage Work by Angela Naimou has received an honorable mention for the Modern Language Association’s William Sanders Scarborough Prize and was named the winner of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize, which is awarded to “the book that makes the most significant contribution to the study of the arts in the present.”
The William Sanders Scarborough Prize is in its fifteenth year and recognizes extraordinary contributions to the study of black American literature or culture. It is one of seventeen awards that will be presented on January 7, 2017, during the MLA’s annual convention, to be held in Philadelphia. FUP will be present at the convention at booth 310.
Naimou’s work deals with legal personhood in its myriad of forms, and closely analyzes the ways that selected literary texts investigate personhood and identity in the context of political and legal constructs.
According to ASAP’s prize committee, Salvage Work: “…traces the haunting ‘debris’ of legacies of legal personhood across contemporary American and Caribbean literature, featuring illuminating studies of Francisco Goldman, Edwidge Danticat, Rosario Ferre, Gayl Jones, and John Edgar Wideman. Her book champions the refugee, the disappeared, the sex worker, the corporation, the sailor, the fugitive, the pregnant woman, and the fetus; what is at stake is viscerally “salvage work,” conceived both as an intellectual endeavor and as a subject of study. An unnerving, at times wrenching, and always original first book, Salvage Work sets a high bar politically, ethically, and stylistically for contemporary literary studies.”
Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures Amid the Debris of Legal Personhood by Angela Naimou can be purchased at Fordham University Press’s website. ($55, cloth, 304 pages).