The difference in how Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison conceived of Black subjectivity has profound consequences for how we understand the audience of African American literature in the contemporary period. While Ellison assumed that the Black subject is invisible because whites fail to recognize African American humanity and complexity, Morrison understood herself to be both legible and embraced by her Black community. Ellison and Morrison represent twin poles for the consideration of such issues as the implicit desire for white validation to the bold expectation that Black life not be explained to outsiders. Evidence of Ellison and Morrison’s respective approach to Black literature is reflected in two recent texts by prominent African American writers. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me (2015) and Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (2019) both highlight how key aspects of Black life remain invisible to white observers while also using readerly intimacy as a potent force for social change. These texts demonstrate the continued tension of presenting Black writing within a national landscape dominated by white hegemonic power.

The framework of environmental violence seeks to address the environmental and human health harms inflicted by the processes of production, especially including climate change and pollution. This paper brings a slow violence and critical knowledge production approach to strengthen the theoretical and methodological foundations in the environmental violence framework. We emphasize the contingent, political processes of the production of scientific knowledge, and how those processes change understandings of both violence and the environment. Our selection of the 1986 Chornobyl disaster as the case study for this chapter illustrates the mutually constructive processes of politics and knowledge production and how understating that mutual dynamic reveals the ways in which the slow environmental harms of Chornobyl were made visible. We aim to accomplish this task by using examples from the social monitoring program of the Department of Social Expertise (of the Institute of Sociology in the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) in its tracking of the embodied environmental effects among sufferers of the Chornobyl disaster. Using the Department of Social Expertise’s data on Chornobyl sufferers, we demonstrate how focusing on the processes of knowledge production is a useful tool in assessing the harms of slow environmental violence.

The second chapter focuses on the tale of Calandrino and the heliotrope (8.3). It asks two primary questions: why does Calandrino need to be a real historical person and what is the role of the custom agents in the tale? The answers to these questions are related because Boccaccio’s documentary style turns the pranks against Calandrino into a form of community policing. The shaming of Calandrino is a group effort and a public spectacle, a form of pittura infamante. In a justice system in which art could function as social conditioning by making citizens feel continually seen, it makes all the difference whether the person depicted can be identified. The tale of Calandrino and the heliotrope is justly celebrated as a masterful reflection on art and illusion. This chapter illustrates the political nature of this reflection. Namely, is Calandrino simply a bad friend—or is he also a bad citizen? Contemporary readers would thus have understood the real threat posed by Calandrino’s illegal—and supposedly undetected—border crossing when he passes through the gates without paying the custom agents. At stake is why we should obey the law when there is no one around to see.

Although judicial bureaucracies are the backbone of international courts and tribunals, their presence remains largely unacknowledged in official discourse and scholarly analysis. This chapter takes collective silence as an object of interest and explores its socio-political dimensions. The role of judicial bureaucrats is an open secret. Courts, government representatives, counsel, and academics are all aware of it, and yet conspire to keep it invisible to the public. The chapter reflects on the reasons behind the conspiracy of silence. Could it be due to the confidential nature of judicial proceedings? To the need to preserve the legitimacy of judicial institutions in the eyes of their audiences? Or, perhaps, to the instinctive desire of international lawyers to maintain an aura of mystery and sanctity around their profession?

This chapter explores how the spatial segregation of Potsdamer Platz is not a matter of architectural design, but rather a particular social mapping that interrelates with status. Potsdamer Platz is designed to reinforce status hierarchies that separate the upperworld and underworld. Whereas the upperworld is shiny and spacious, the underworld is dark, labyrinthine, cramped and malodorous. These worlds have distinct populations: shoppers, tourists, white-collar workers and wealthy residents above, cleaners and other workers below. The cleaners have access to the upperworld for the purpose of cleaning it, but the people from above cannot enter the underworld. It remains hidden, buried spatially and discursively, making cleaners into an invisible “presence from below.” However, cleaners experience themselves and their place at Potsdamer Platz not just as an invisible presence from below. They are part of a workers’ scene that extends from the corporate underworld to the upperworld. The underworld is also more than a dark and sticky space for them. They turn to it as a place of social encounters, of taking breaks and withdrawing from the gaze of managers and clients alike.

This chapter develops how surveillance shapes cleaners’ everyday work life. Cleaners experience being watched by clients, security guards, CleanUp management, and even co-workers. Surveillance constitutes an attack on their sense of worth. It stands for distrust in their work ability and efforts, and the resulting need to control them. Cleaners respond to surveillance by engaging in tactics ranging from what I term turning off and away from surveillance to turning against those who watch them. Cleaners’ urge to counter surveillance in order to retain a sense of dignity – no matter how fragile and short-lived – can surpass the fear of getting into trouble. Surveillance can come with a degree of thrill, excitement and even a sense of superiority in the hunt for ways to outwit and resist it. However, it can also summon feelings of degradation and indignity, especially when cleaners get caught. But no matter how strenuously cleaners resist surveillance, it does not follow that they resist work too. Indeed, for cleaners, maintaining dignity requires a balancing act of outwitting surveillance, finding autonomy, and working hard enough to uphold a work ethic and related sense of self-worth.

The stories about Raúl claimed that it was impossible to know where he came from; that he came “from nowhere.” This chapter shows exactly where he, and so many other Afro-Argentines, came from and how they made their way in a rapidly changing society. But it also illustrates why Afro-Argentines have been so difficult to locate in the historical record. The eve of the abolition of slavery (1853–61) saw the emergence of the racial narratives of Black collective demise and disappearance that would haunt Raúl decades later. “Ancestors” relates the experiences of Raúl’s grandparents’ generation to introduce two intertwined themes that frame the book as a whole: the tendency for Afro-Argentines in the post-abolition period to become at once invisible (through liberals’ removal of racial and caste categories) and punitively hypervisible (when they did not conform to purportedly universal patterns of behavior, politics, and culture that were actually based on White and European models). After briefly situating several generations of Raúl’s ancestors who arrived from Africa and moved from slavery to freedom (thus providing background on colonial and early Republican Buenos Aires), the chapter follows Raúl’s paternal grandparents, Domingo and Cayetana, as they made a life together in the small house they owned, started a family, and built ties of spiritual kinship to the city’s vibrant Black community. Because Domingo was the second-generation leader of a famous candombe (a space for Africans and their descendants to gather, play ritual music, and dance), his social networks allow me to tell a robust and surprising new history of Afro-Argentine music and sociability (continued in subsequent chapters).

I introduce readers to Raúl Grigera, to master narratives of race (Whiteness and Blackness) in Argentina, and to the hundreds of defamatory stories by which Raúl came to be known and remembered. I use this corpus to sketch the composite story of his life that the book goes on to debunk and rewrite: his supposedly unknowable or inexplicable origins, his early orphandom and wayward youth, his spurious fame as a buffoon of the city’s elite, his oft-anticipated decline and death. Engaging with literature in psychology, critical race studies, literary theory, and other fields to explore narrative’s singularly persuasive power, the introduction develops the concept of “racial stories” and makes the case for the urgency of crafting new, critical counter-stories. It goes on to explore the problem of Black celebrity in a White nation where that idea was almost a contradiction in terms. Finally, it considers my own role as one more narrator of Raúl’s tale – yet another racial storyteller – and provides an overview of the book’s arguments and structure.

This chapter explores the irony of Asian Americans as both scrutinized and invisible in a group of Asian American literary works written between 1965 and 1995. These subjects are perceived as remarkable for their racial difference. However, racist laws before 1965 governed their legal status, subsequently circumscribing them politically, socially, and culturally. The paradox of being overly acknowledged for racial difference while ignored as a political or other agential subject renders the Asian American an impossible subject. Indeed, Asian Americans have existed in a state of inconceivability.

Chapter 1 argues that Victorian studies of animal mimicry and camouflage (known collectively as crypsis) resisted the hardening dichotomy between science and the arts. Researchers drew on their subjective perceptions, and art theories and techniques, to represent crypsis and recreate its illusions for readers. The first theorisers of ‘protective mimicry’, Henry Walter Bates and Alfred Russel Wallace, laced their writings with personal anecdotes of being deceived by animals’ appearances. Such narratives substituted for the imagined experiences of these animals’ predators and prey. It is proposed that these texts followed a pattern of perceptual self-scrutiny and suspended judgement that had been articulated by the art critic John Ruskin. Bates, Wallace and, even more, the Oxford zoologist Edward Bagnall Poulton also sought to simulate experiences of crypsis through illustrations. Accompanying text guided readers through the trompe l'oeil much as Ruskin’s ekphrastic prose guided the consumption of paintings. The tension between such artistic science and the rising ideal of objectivity came to a head in the controversial work of the American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Although Thayer made some lasting contributions to crypsis studies, his approach to nature as an artwork that only artists could understand provoked strong attacks from some zoologists.

Chapter 5 contends that crypsis acted as a versatile trope by which fin-de-siècle literary and cultural critics thought through and complicated ideals of self-expression and originality. The critics discussed often invoked animal crypsis as a figure of conformity and bad faith, the opposite of authentic, autonomous expression. Such cryptophobic individualism is traced through the work of Lesley Stephen, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and its contradictions examined. Although the trope drew on the imagery of adaptive appearance, its ideal of authentic expression was incongruent with the latter’s semiotic logic. Further, several of the authors discussed worried that too much discursive individualism and authenticity would threaten social cohesion. Stephen’s and Watts-Dunton’s religious and literary criticism attacked cultural imitation and protective mimicry while fearing that their removal might presage violent revolution or degeneration. Walter Pater, conversely, concluded that all art was inherently mimetic, reworking elements from pre-existing sources. He suggested that individualism was attained by mixing eclectic influences, generating novel combinations. It would take Pater’s pupil, Oscar Wilde, though, to fully realise the radical implications of such mimetic individualism. His vision of artistic authenticity required eluding recognition so that, paradoxically, the artist truly stood out by blending in.

The introduction to Finding Afro-Mexico explores how to combine the histories of modern Mexico and the African Diaspora. It contends that scholars need to consider the cultural and spatial constructions of race in order to understand Mexican conceptions of blackness as Mexican intellectuals, cultural producers, and policy makers did. Celebrating the Mexican state’s announcement that 1.4 million citizens self-identified as African-descended in 2015, scholars and activists in Mexico and the United States have examined the history of Mexico’s African-descended peoples through the trope of racial disappearance, a tenet of nineteenth-century liberalism that has not been deconstructed into its social, demographic, cultural, and spatial dimensions. The introduction outlines the political, social, cultural, and methodological stakes of exploring blackness in Mexico exclusively through the social and demographic visibility yearned for before 2015 and heralded after. In particular, it argues that a focus on whether black bodies were -- and are -- socially and demographically present silences Mexican racial formations that highlight blackness culturally as symbols of racial egalitarianism, postrevolutionary social justice, and national modernity.