Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination

The hands of colonized subjects - South Asian craftsmen, Egyptian mummies, harem women, and Congolese children - were at the crux of Victorian discussions of the body that tried to come to terms with the limits of racial identification. While religious, scientific, and literary discourses privileged hands as sites of physiognomic information, none of these found plausible explanations for what these body parts could convey about ethnicity. As compensation for this absence, which might betray the fact that race was not actually inscribed on the body, fin-de-siècle narratives sought to generate models for how non-white hands might offer crucial means of identifying and theorizing racial identity. They removed hands from a holistic corporeal context and allowed them to circulate independently from the body to which they originally belonged. Severed hands consequently served as 'human tools' that could be put to use in a number of political, aesthetic, and ideological contexts.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction; 1. The case of the blank hand: race and manual legibility; 2. Potters and prosthetics: putting Indian hands to work; 3. The mummy's hand: art and evolution; 4. A hand for a hand: punishment, responsibility, and imperial desire; 5. Crimes of the hand: manual violence and the Congo; Coda; Bibliography.

Über den Autor / die Autorin

Aviva Briefel is Professor of English and Cinema Studies at Bowdoin College, Maine. She is the author of The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (2006) and the co-editor of Horror after 9/11: World of Fear, Cinema of Terror (2011).

Zusammenfassung

The hands of colonized subjects were vital sites of fascination and interpretation in late-Victorian imperial narratives. The book considers accounts of fingerprinting, amputation, disease, manual labor, and mummification as central examples of the racial significance assigned to hands around the fin de siècle.

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Aviva Briefel, Aviva (Bowdoin College Briefel, Briefel Aviva
• Verlag: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 31.10.2017
• EAN: 9781107538917
• ISBN: 978-1-107-53891-7
• Seiten: 234
• Serien: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature & Culture; Cambridge Studies in Nineteent; Cambridge Studies in Nineteent; Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Themen: Belletristik > Lyrik, Dramatik; Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Englische Sprachwissenschaft / Literaturwissenschaft; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, Cultural Studies, English, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, Colonialism & imperialism, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900