The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination

Aviva Briefel

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781107116580
• eBook ISBN: 9781316391051
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria inglesa

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Series information
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The case of the blank hand: race and manual legibility
• Chapter 2 Potters and prosthetics: putting Indian hands to work
• Chapter 3 The mummy’s hand: art and evolution
• Chapter 4 A hand for a hand: punishment, responsibility, and imperial desire
• Chapter 5 Crimes of the hand: manual violence and the Congo
• Coda
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Series list