Nobody Move borrows its title from the critically acclaimed 1983 album by Yellowman (born 1956), who made history as the first Jamaican dancehall deejay to release an album with a U.S. music label, paving the way for the early pioneers of American rap.
Featured alongside him are three other accomplished figures:
- Jamaica Kincaid (born 1949), the Antiguan-American novelist and essayist whose writings on the experience of diaspora and displacement have given an influential voice to post-colonial studies and women’s advancement in a Caribbean and African American context.
- British explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1868–1912) who, with his team, tragically perished shortly after reaching the South Pole only to discover that they were not the first to get there as they had been led to believe.
- Virginia Woolf (1882–1941), whose revisionist approach to literature and campaigning role in the nascent feminist movement of the early 20th century influenced societal shifts towards inclusion and equality.
They are among numerous accomplished individuals—living and historic—to whom Strachan pays tribute in his Encyclopedia of Invisibility, a copiously researched A-to-Z compendium of some 17,000 entries chronicling people, places, events, objects, concepts, and phenomena that have been overlooked, lost, or made invisible in some way.
Bold alphabetical letters leap out amid these under-recognized or forgotten giants among other illustrations and images which represent archetypal symbols of “progress”: the silhouette of early hominids evolving to walk upright, encyclopedic entries, a blank crossword puzzle, and a U.S. NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) diagram of the basketball court. Using the rubric of received knowledge to make networks and structures of power more visible, Strachan excavates hidden histories to bring to light ground-breaking yet forgotten epics and little-known human achievements.