Technology and the Logic of American Racism : A Cultural History of the Body as Evidence

by Chinn, Sarah E.

• ISBN13: 9780826447296
• ISBN10: 0826447295
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-09-01
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Academic

Summary

In this book, Sarah E. Chinn pulls together what seems to be opposite discourses--the information-driven languages of law and medicine and the subjective logics of racism--to examine how racial identity has been constructed in the United States over the past century. She examines a range of primary social case studies such as the American Red Cross' lamentable decision to segregate the blood of black and white donors during World War II, and its ramifications for American culture, and more recent examples that reveal the racist nature of criminology, such as the recent trial of O.J. Simpson. Among several key American literary texts, she looks at Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, a novel whose plot turns on issues of racial identity and which was written at a time when scientific and popular interest in evidence of the body, such as fingerprinting, was at a peak.

Author Biography

Sarah E. Chinn is Assistant Professor in English at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut

Table of Contents

Series foreword	vii
Acknowledgments	ix
Preface	xi
Theorizing the body as evidence	1	(23)
A show of hands: establishing identity in Mark Twain's The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson	24	(29)
Fixing identity: reading skin, seeing race	53	(40)
``Liberty's life stream'': blood, race, and citizenship in World War II	93	(48)
Reading the ``Book of Life'': DNA and the meaning of identity	141	(31)
Epilogue: future bodies, present selves	168	(4)
Notes	172	(35)
Bibliography	207	(20)
Index	227