The 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.

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'The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination is an essential read for Victorian, Modernist, and even Postmodern and Contemporary scholars. Briefel’s excellent book contributes to the fields of hand, literary rape, feminist, postcolonial, and posthuman studies, demanding that we explore the ethical implications of reading the hand in the Victorian imagination as a signifier of either individual or collective identity by contending with questions of race all too often overlooked.' Kimberly Cox, The British Society for Literature and Science Reviews

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Product details

• Date Published: September 2015
• format: Hardback
• isbn: 9781107116580
• length: 236 pages

• dimensions: 229 x 152 x 14 mm
• weight: 0.54kg
• contains: 12 b/w illus.
• availability: Available