A brilliant and affective blend of criticism and memoir, filled with sharp insights, erudite readings, and beautiful prose. It presents and connects challenging and innovative new ideas around empire and the culture and education is creates. Moments of wit and frank personal recollection make it a surprisingly enjoyable and accessible read for a work of literary criticism.

This is a fantastic reread of a lot of the "greats" of European canon, especially as it's taught in our schools currently, and Ms. Brand reexamines them from the angle of how they handle the existence of Black persons in the narrative. I get the sense that a good deal of people are likely going to be made uncomfortable, but it is worth highlighting for the reasons that these voices are normally ignored. Highly recommended fall read.

Salvage begins with a discussion of two paintings of boats before transitioning to the losses of life when a ship sinks, considering both modern media coverage of the wrecks full of refugees and the historic losses of the middle passage. From there, Brand transitions to our present society, our need for capital trade, heavily reliant on shipping, and how the American society still exists in parallel to the world present in literary works from our past. Brand reflects on his personal biography, drawing out from an early childhood photo and critiques the world view presented through some of the great English literary novels.

The sections that draw from both the evidence of Brand's life by photography or memory and the narratives of Vanity Fair, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, and . Mansfield Park. In this she looks to the abscesses in the writing, the unsaid source of the power that made the lavish lifestyles in this books possible, but that the writer left unsaid. Brand brings it to the present from her own life and contemporary novels or re-tellings of classic works.

In all the works above (and additional titles) the assumption was their being read by a white audience and that they reinforce the imperialist worldview common held then, and still lingering.

Salvage is an insightful and self described forensic of how a reader is made and unmade. (pg. 14).

Recommended to researchers and readers of English literature, literary criticism and racism and imperialism in literature.

An incredible work of nonfiction, Salvage is an excavation of classic texts to be read through a decolonial lens. Dionne is such a powerful thinker and writer. This book will fundamentally change who you are as a reader and how you read all texts.

Dionne. Brand. Mesmerizing. Simply mesmerizing. You know what's funny, one of the essays of this book was the main inspiration for the title of my PhD thesis. Seeing it here as one of the essays made my jaw drop and I am still trying to pick it up. Incredible. Every single part of this book is important and necessary. I can't talk enough about the way these literatures seep into our psyche and you wonder, Is there something wrong with me or am I actually right in noticing something's off? And my god, the way Brand tackles precisely this is poignant and phenomenal. I cannot wait for people to read this book. Outstanding work. Honored to have received an eARC.

Whenever I encounter the criticism + memoir, one of the two is stronger than the other. It is inconsistent as to which. Salvage is the closest to a balanced take that I have encountered. The fragments of personal story is related to the crit as the crit is about the experience of being Black and encountering the colonial in English literature, both that having outright colonial motifs but importantly that which primarily does not, but still exists out of a world created by those colonial ambitions.

There is not a singular argument here, but I think that the primary one is about the inescapablity of racism. It is not just in the texts, but overtly and covertly, but also in the retellings and reinterpretations of the texts, even when the attempt may be otherwise. It is hard to escape the romantic qualities of a racist world, regardless of how you juggle who is where doing what. That creates unique tensions to a Black reader of those texts. I would rebalance the sections but the book provides a useful framework, even as it is less one that I can apply as observe.

My thanks to the author, Dionne Brand, for writing the book, and to the publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, for making the ARC available to me.