The Arresting Eye

Race and the Anxiety of Detection
Erscheinungsjahr 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8139-3701-4
Verlag: University of Virginia Press

Buch, Englisch, 232 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 229 mm

Reihe: Cultural Frames, Framing Culture

In her reading of detective fiction and passing narratives from the end of the nineteenth century forward, Jinny Huh investigates anxieties about race and detection. Adopting an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, she examines the racial formations of African Americans and Asian Americans not only in detective fiction (from Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan to the works of Pauline Hopkins) but also in narratives centered on detection itself (such as Winnifred Eaton’s rhetoric of undetection in her Japanese romances). In explicating the literary depictions of race-detection anxiety, Huh demonstrates how cultural, legal, and scientific discourses across diverse racial groups were also struggling with demands for racial decipherability. Anxieties of detection and undetection, she concludes, are not mutually exclusive but mutually dependent on each other's construction and formation in American history and culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Über Autor(innen)

Jinny Huh is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Vermont, USA.