The racial hand in the Victorian imagination /

The racial hand in the Victorian imagination /

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Bibliographic Details
Author / Creator:	Briefel, Aviva, author.
Imprint:	Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York : Cambridge University Press, 2015.
Description:	x, 218 pages ; 24 cm.
Language:	English
Series:	Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 102 Cambridge studies in nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 102.
Subject:	English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism. Race in literature. Hand in literature. English fiction. Hand in literature. Race in literature. Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Format:	Print Book
URL for this record:	http://pi.lib.uchicago.edu/1001/cat/bib/10378058

Hidden Bibliographic Details
ISBN:	9781107116580 (hardback) 1107116589 (hardback)
Notes:	Includes bibliographical references and index.
Summary:	"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-siecle 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"--

Table of Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 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.