Hershini Young

Young is working a new book project entitled Receiving the Wreck: Black Sociality and the Materiality of Salvage. The chapter "A Spoonful of Dirt: Salvage as Exhumatory Practice" asks what the practice of large-scale exhumation tells us about how black and brown bodies are weighted. To do this, she turns to aesthetic performances of exhumation and reburial as well as contemporary examples of "rescuing" and identifying migrant corpses in the Mediterranean. Much of the chapter revolves around a spoonful of dirt. Her work develops salvage as an example of what Amade M’charek and Sara Casartelli call “forensic care work.” Hoping to compensate for the state’s neglect of the corpses exhumed with the surfacing of the wreck of the Lampedusa, sunk of the coast of Italy, the Melilli5 forensic team collected personal effects, placing them in plastic bags with the same identification number as on the coffin or plaque. They salvaged a spoonful of dirt that had been wrapped and carefully stored in a pocket, discovered a photograph sewn into the lining of a jacket, and rescued a boy’s report card from his pocket. Cattaneo, in her development of salvage as forensic care, put out a call to European embassies in Eritrea, Somalia and Ethiopia, informing anyone searching for loved ones who might have been on board the capsized ship. Members of more than fifty families came to seek their dead. She argue that part of salvage as forensic care work was the response of these families who undertook the journey to confront possible familial remains despite considerable personal cost and the tenuousness of material evidence. Thirty-one of the dead were named, allowing us to theorize the necessity of forensic care work as a way of actualizing the corpse’s capacity to perform black sociality and to resist the state’s control over the meaning and value of our disprized black bodies, both alive and dead.