The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination

Erscheinungsjahr 2017
ISBN: 978-1-107-53891-7
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 102, 234 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 349 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Briefel, Aviva

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtswissenschaft Allgemein
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

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 Autor(innen)

Briefel, Aviva
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).