Farooq, Nihad M. (Author)
Duke University
Wald, Priscilla
Edition Details: Advisor: Wald, Priscilla
Physical Details: 260 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation investigates the prevalence of sensory language in key scientific, literary, and ethnographic texts from the late nineteenth- through mid-twentieth centuries in Britain and America, and addresses its complicated role in delineating and dismantling racial hierarchies. I argue that the modern Western subject actively refuses recognition with racial others in moments of encounter, insisting instead on perceptual and cultural boundaries that keep him in a controlled pose--in the fantasy of an "ethnographic present" that can be nostalgic about the past and dissolve unwanted differences through preservationist discourse, while also safeguarding against cultural extinction and racial hybridity through the assertion of a nativist, nationalist exceptionalism. In Sensing Subjects, I contend that Charles Darwin's uncanny encounter with the native inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego stands as the metonymic moment for the inauguration of this anxious modernity that shaped scientific and literary discourses about race throughout England and America at the turn of the last century. For all its emphasis on randomness, chance, variation, and hybridity, the story of evolutionary theory had to be retold as one that would not topple or threaten the exalted and distinct cultural status of the Anglo-Saxon man. As race preservation became a cultural and scientific priority in the new century, the specimen of the racially-marked body became the object of curious study, anxious surveillance, and diligent documentation for artists, ethnographers, and scientists alike. Sensory evidence thus became the signpost for recognizing and recording racial difference and relegating it to its proper place. In the five chapters that follow, I trace how sensory vocabulary is used in certain scientific and literary narratives from fin de siècle Britain to twentieth-century America to transform uncanny experiences of kinship into narratives of distinction and difference, and how modernity performs and grapples with the futility of this gesture. I examine texts by Charles Darwin, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, Franz Boas, Jacob Riis, Anzia Yezierska, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston, to reveal, in part, how moments of encounter are peculiarly marked by heightened sensory perception. Whether it is the terror evoked by the uncanny sight of the "savage," the lack of "taste" that betrays the inassimilable foreigner, the unbearable sound of a stranger in pain, or the penetrating touch of an alien body, the moment of encounter is always marked by a distinct appeal to the senses of the observer or reader, revealing the ways that otherness must be singled out as distinctly different from the familiar or norm, but can also seep into one's physical and psychic space. An examination of modernity through this perceptual lens, I argue, provides useful insights into the instability of categories like foreign and familial, and serves as the linguistic vehicle through which scientific and literary narratives of distinction and superiority are both asserted and undone.
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/05 (2007). Pub. no. AAT 3264037.
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