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Fingerprinting the nation: Identify...

Samuels, Ellen Jean.

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Fingerprinting the nation: Identifying race and disability in America.

Record Type:	Language materials, printed : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Fingerprinting the nation: Identifying race and disability in America./
Author:	Samuels, Ellen Jean.
Description:	232 p.
Notes:	Adviser: Susan Schweik.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International68-02A.
Subject:	American Studies. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3254060

Fingerprinting the nation: Identifying race and disability in America.
Samuels, Ellen Jean.

Fingerprinting the nation: Identifying race and disability in America. - 232 p.

Adviser: Susan Schweik.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2006.

This dissertation investigates cultural representations of identification in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. I use the guiding trope of fingerprints to analyze how identification is shaped by crucial tensions between race and disability, medicine and the law, body and text, arguing that efforts to reduce identity to a matter of physical legibility revealed deep ambivalences.Subjects--Topical Terms:

1017604
American Studies.

Fingerprinting the nation: Identifying race and disability in America.
LDR:03279nam 2200325 a 45 001 968232
005 20110915
008 110915s2006 eng d
035 $a (UMI)AAI3254060
035 $a AAI3254060
040 $a UMI $c UMI
100 1 $a Samuels, Ellen Jean. $3 1292090
245 1 0 $a Fingerprinting the nation: Identifying race and disability in America.
300 $a 232 p.
500 $a Adviser: Susan Schweik.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 68-02, Section: A, page: 0572.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of California, Berkeley, 2006.
520 $a This dissertation investigates cultural representations of identification in the United States from the mid-nineteenth to early-twentieth centuries. I use the guiding trope of fingerprints to analyze how identification is shaped by crucial tensions between race and disability, medicine and the law, body and text, arguing that efforts to reduce identity to a matter of physical legibility revealed deep ambivalences.
520 $a In my first chapter, I explore the "disability con," a culturally persistent portrayal of fake disability, extending from Herman Melville's 1857 novel The Confidence-Man through early silent films and movies of the late twentieth-century. I relate these cultural representations to tensions regarding the emerging systems of entitlements for people with disabilities, tension which produced extreme social anxiety.
520 $a My second chapter examines the convergence of the disability con and racial masquerade through the 1860 narrative of William and Ellen Craft, who escaped from slavery by adopting, for Ellen, the disguise of a white, "invalid," gentleman. I analyze representations of this disguise to argue that disability often functions as a trope of physical immutability against which race and gender may be explored as social constructions, and I propose an interconnective analysis in which race, gender, and disability are read as mutually constitutive.
520 $a In my third and fourth chapters, I move from considering "problems" of identity to exploring proposed cultural solutions. I examine narratives of the trial of Salome Muller ("The White Slave") and Pauline Hopkins's 1902 novel Of One Blood, or The Hidden Self to explore how birthmarks emerged during this period as ideal signs of identity, figured as purely physical, yet mediated through language. I suggest that this fixation on birthmarks signaled the emergence of a cultural fantasy of identification , as an objective, physical system which circulated in tandem with, and eventually supplanted, nostalgic fantasies of personal recognition.
520 $a My fourth chapter then demonstrates how the fantasy of identification contributed to the modern emergence of fingerprinting. Through Mark Twain's 1894 novella Pudd'nhead Wilson, I argue that the new "science" of fingerprinting was both produced by and contributory toward anxieties about race and disability identity.
590 $a School code: 0028.
650 4 $a American Studies. $3 1017604
650 4 $a Literature, American. $3 1017657
650 4 $a Sociology, Ethnic and Racial Studies. $3 1017474
690 $a 0323
690 $a 0591
690 $a 0631
710 2 0 $a University of California, Berkeley. $3 687832
773 0 $t Dissertation Abstracts International $g 68-02A.
790 $a 0028
790 1 0 $a Schweik, Susan, $e advisor
791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 2006
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3254060