This chapter describes material and immaterial labour in the context of the industrial production, resource extraction, and global circulation of the silvery-alkali metal known as lithium. It focuses on the different kinds of material labour involved in lithium’s extraction from local sites in and around the Atacama Desert in Latin America, as well as less visible forms of labour underpinning the mining industry, including the labour of social reproduction and colonial dispossession. In this context, it asks: how do narrative arts document the violence of lithium’s extraction as it materialises in damaged and dispossessed bodies and environments, as well as those less visible traces of lithium’s circulation around the world, and the different affective economies it inhabits? I suggest that a contradiction or tension between materiality and immateriality, between what is seen and unseen, defines every level of lithium’s transformation into a commodity, as registered within global networks of labour. These larger systems, I argue, are rendered invisible; just as lithium silently provides the charge for iPhone and Tesla, it is a vanishing mediator to what some thinkers have described as ‘new extractive imperialism’. This, however, becomes visible—precisely as a kind of ideological dissimulation—across a whole range of narrative forms.

Chapter 5 addresses the application of the law on disfigurement from the point of view of employers. It analyses the findings from interviews with HR and EDI professionals about their approaches to disfigurement equality at work. It explores employer approaches to visible difference in a variety of contexts – from recruitment to workplace culture to making reasonable adjustments. This chapter reveals considerable uncertainty among employers about how to address the social barriers of looking different. This uncertainty is addressed by guidance in Appendix 1. Moreover, drawing on literature about the legal consciousness of human resources departments, it also uncovers tensions in the daily reality of HR practice which may impact both their ability and motivation to create appearance-inclusive workplaces.

Chapter 3 focuses on the notion of invisibility by tracking the life of a political speech from assignment to delivery. Mapes’ theoretical framework for this analysis comprises three interrelated concepts: language materiality (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012), or the ways in which language and material objects are complicatedly entwined and consequently a matter of political economy; text trajectories (e.g. Lillis 2008), as in the processes that facilitate a text’s evolution; and entextualization (Bauman and Briggs 1990), the de- and recontextualization of language. Following Macgilchist and Van Hout’s (2011) ethnographic approach to documenting text trajectories, the analysis is divided into three case studies which together demonstrate speechwriters’ strategic and material erasure throughout the evolution of their deliverables. Ultimately, Mapes concludes by arguing that this ethnographic text trajectory evidence is another indication of the ways in which language workers must discursively enact Urciuoli’s (2008) “new worker-self” in order to claim status and success as wordsmiths.

Chapter 5 applies Welby’s Meaning Triad to analyze the definition of ‘child’ in international law, especially in the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC 1989) as concerns the girl child. It explores the sense of ‘silence’ in terms of gender neutrality and the absence of any reference to the girl child or violations specific to her. It studies the meaning-intention of the CRC drafters and thus the travaux préparatoires. Finally, it examines the significance of the wording of CRC provisions, and how it impacts the protection, implementation and monitoring of girl child rights. In this context, Chapter 5 discusses Peirce’s immediate, dynamical and final interpretants, and studies reservations to the CRC and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW 1979). It employs semioethics to propose an amended definition that would undoubtedly include the girl child and thereby guarantee her visibility, both legally and symbolically.

Following a brief historical overview of the birth of the organised movement, Chapter 1 introduces literary figures and texts promoted by antivivisection periodicals such as the Zoophilist, the Home Chronicler, and the Animals Guardian. Adopting a literary-critical approach offers a fresh perspective on the movement’s association pamphlets and periodicals which have, thus far, largely been examined as historical documents. Poems, stories, and ‘humane words’ from notable writers were sourced and deployed to shape a common antivivisectionist identity, articulate the movement’s ideology, and mobilise activists. Analysis of antivivisection poems by Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Buchanan is complemented by attention to the framing and reception of these works in antivivisection publications and the wider press.

The classification of natural spaces and cultural practices as ‘heritage’ profoundly alters their form and function. Individuals and communities responsible for maintaining the space or practice are often subjected to the dictates of governments, non-governmental institutions and tourists’ tastes, whilst the symbols of heritage themselves are projected as emblematic of how the state wishes itself to be perceived. The condition of statelessness magnifies the vulnerability of communities to these processes of heritagization, with the state co-opting cultural attributes into icons of heritage without any prospect of redress and exacerbating the invisibility and relative lack of agency that characterize many stateless communities. This chapter explores these issues in the context of mobile maritime communities that are stateless or at risk of statelessness in Southeast Asia. It demonstrates how states such as Malaysia, Thailand and Myanmar have introduced restrictions on everyday livelihood practices through the imposition of marine protected areas and transformed other aspects of these communities’ lives, such as their houseboats, into objects of touristic consumption under the aegis of natural, cultural and intangible ‘heritage’ that serve to benefit the state yet further degrade the human rights of individuals in the affected communities.

A brief conclusion summarizes the argument as a whole, asserts that God is physically visible in Jesus’s body, considers the impact of this conclusion on Johannine scholarship, and suggests further areas of research.

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.