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"Tucker, Irene"
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Historicizing the Theorization of Race: A Nineteenth-Century Story
In this essay, I bring together Victorian studies and race studies in an effort
to overturn what has come to be the most familiar form of racial analysis in
contemporary culture: the notion that race is “constructed,” that it operates by
aligning visible marks of difference with a shifting— and hence
contingent—series of meanings and associations. I argue that the very concept of
an arbitrary, constructed racial sign might itself have a history. Rather than
presuming that skin functions as the default sign of racial difference and then
tracing a given set of meanings that might be appended to that sign, I open my
analysis by noting that in the final quarter of the eighteenth century,
skin suddenly came to be privileged as the primary sign of
racial identity. Immanuel Kant has long been identified as the first prominent
European thinker to single out skin color in this way, and, as a consequence, I
examine his essay on the topic, “On the Use of Teleological Principles for
Philosophy” (1788). Read in the context of his late essay on the relationship
between philosophy and medicine in The Conflict of the
Faculties, Kant's emphasis on skin color suddenly becomes legible
in the light of shifting medical paradigms of the human body. Racial
constructionism's rhetoric of otherness obscures the degree to which perceiving
race involves, for better or for worse, experiencing individuals'
likeness to one another rather than their difference.
Kant's racial skin turns likeness from an idea that must be discovered over time
to something legible instantly.
Journal Article
PICTURING UTILITARIANISM: JOHN STUART MILL AND THE INVENTION OF A PHOTOGRAPHIC PUBLIC
In writing, as Friedrich Kittler reminds us, the representation of perceptions and the storage of that said representation are one and the same. Mill's abrupt movement into formalism subjects are defined not by what they think, their opinions, but by how they think - likewise delineates this new distinction, but rather than establishing this realm as entirely autonomous, such formalism insists upon the contingency and unpredictability of the effects produced by this mental activity. Because any particular habit of thought functions as much in relation to other sorts of habits of thought as in relation to their outcomes, the effects of the introduction of women's mental eclecticism into the public realm are not predictable in advance, the oblique pressures of influence registering as something short of cause.
Journal Article
Race
This chapter traces the emergence of a range of different conceptions of race over the long-nineteenth century. As a variety of disciplines and discourses took up the task of delineating the dynamics of the social world from those of the natural world, the category of race emerged as a point of contact and, consequently, as a point of especially intense disputation. These disputes over the nature of race shaped discussions about the processes of medical diagnosis, the nature of British citizenship, the shape and authority of newly professionalized social science disciplines like anthropology, and the political strategies of abolitionism.
This chapter discusses the emergence of a range of different conceptions of race over the long-nineteenth century. Contemporary debates concerning race figured the concept variously as a natural force driving human behavior, the instantiation of fundamentally linguistic differences, and the embodied expression of a range of human impulses. The self-evidence of the quality to be made sense of is what made race the object of such contention, as it promised, with the authority born of this self-evidence, a foundation upon which otherwise speculative analytical frameworks might build their own explanatory force. The divergence of the two concepts has generated a second genealogy as well, one that is arguably at the heart of the vision of nineteenth-century race, and which continues to structure much of contemporary criticism as well. The persistence into the present of the aesthetic form of beauty found in Greek sculpture stands as evidence of the unchanging quality of the European race.
Book Chapter
Paranoid Imaginings: Wilkie Collins, the Rugeley Poisoner, and the Invisibility of Novelistic Ekphrasis
The paradigm of anatomical medicine that came to the fore in the final decade of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth differed from its humoral precursor in insisting that the causes of disease are entirely internal, located in individual organs unavailable to direct observation by either patient or physician. Tucked deep within the body's cavity, diseased organs are hidden from the sick patient's view by the skin of the body's surface. This evocation of the not-quite-present is immediately generalized as a narrative mode - Marian must remember who smokes cigarettes and who smokes cigars in order to make sense of the activity beneath her window - and so crucial is this knowledge gleaned from past experience that we are offered it not as a distinct set of facts but in relation to the conclusions that Marian is able to draw.
Journal Article
International Whiggery
Implicit in the notion of the self-evidence of the category of the Victorian is the fact of its Englishness: where both Romantic-era poets and philosophers as well as analysts of Romanticism were impelled to offer some abstract account of what they were doing in order to draw together disparate, aesthetic, and philosophical productions from across a variety of Western European cultures, and to produce a work of Victorian culture one simply had to \"be\"--in a certain place. Tucker argues that not only people will likely to emerge with a very different sense of what Victorians were thinking, doing, and imagining, but they are also likely to discover unexpected genealogies for their most intimate--and most automatic--critical practices.
Journal Article
