Technology and the Logic of American Racism

A Cultural History of the Body As Evidence

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects American Studies Cultural Studies Literary Studies Literary Studies MOSTLY Theory Race & Culture

by Sarah E. Chinn

Continuum Publishing

Due/Published September 2000, 256 pages, paper

ISBN 0826447503

Chinn looks at how blood and other corporeal evidence has been used to "prove" cultural assumptions about race. She blends analyses of history of science, popular culture, forensic technology, and literary texts and draws on a notion of evidence that includes fingerprints, skin, color, and blood to examine how racial identity has been constructed in the US over the past century.

She begins with a study of Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson to explore how new ways of reading bodies developed at the end of the 19th century. She analyzes the growth of the American scientific passion for turning people into numbers and bodily characteristics into racial "identities." Contrasting Nella Larsen's Passing, Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry, and the Rhinelander miscegenation scandal of the 1920s, Chinn explores the meanings of skin color and racial identity in early 20th century America.

Chinn goes on to investigate the meaning of "blood" by examining the Red Cross' racial segregation of blood donated by African Americans and Japanese Americans. Lastly, as new technologies, such as DNA testing, allow the body to be read, Chinn argues that this is simply the latest enactment of a discourse that seeks to cement racial, gender, and class identities as empirical, rather than constructed. The example of genetic evidence proving that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemming's children does, in Chinn's view, offer a different vision--that DNA can show Americans that their bodies are evidence not of exclusivity, but of multiplicity.