The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination: 102 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, Series Number 102)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 9/16/2015
EAN 9781107116580, ISBN10: 1107116589
Hardcover, 236 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.
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.