The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination

A fascinating study that explores the power of the racially identified hand as a narrative symbol in Victorian literature and culture.

Aviva Briefel (Author)

9781107116580, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 16 September 2015

236 pages, 12 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.4 cm, 0.54 kg

'… rich, cogent, and eminently readable … Briefel's book is an indispensable part of an emerging area of focus in nineteenth-century studies … Marshaling a rich array of historical, scientific, popular, and literary texts with a deft and restrained critical touch, Briefel has offered the reader a gift - one dropped gently into our hands.' Daniel A. Novak, Novel: A Forum on Fiction

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.

Subject Areas: Cultural studies [JFC], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF]