Book contents
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Race and Empire in the 1890s
- Chapter 2 Island Dandies, Transpacific Decadence, and the Politics of Style
- Chapter 3 The 1890s and East Asia: Toward a Critical Cosmopolitanism
- Chapter 4 Indulekha, or The Many Lives of Realism at the Fin de Siècle
- Chapter 5 Reading World Religions in the 1890s
- Chapter 6 Night Lights: The 1890s Nocturne
- Chapter 7 The Green 1890s:
- Chapter 8 “Only Nature Is a Thing Unreal”: The Anthropocene 1890s
- Chapter 9 Weird Ecologies and the Limits of Environmentalism
- Chapter 10 Queer Theories of the 1890s
- Chapter 11 Eugenics and Degeneration in Socialist-Feminist Novels of the Mid-1890s
- Chapter 12 The Conservative and Patriotic 1890s
- Chapter 13 Decadence and the Antitheatrical Prejudice
- Chapter 14 Religion and Science in the 1890s
- Chapter 15 Little Magazines and/in Media History
- Chapter 16 Fin-de-Siècle Visuality (and Textuality) and the Digital Sphere
- Index
Chapter 1 - Race and Empire in the 1890s
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 August 2023
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition
- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Race and Empire in the 1890s
- Chapter 2 Island Dandies, Transpacific Decadence, and the Politics of Style
- Chapter 3 The 1890s and East Asia: Toward a Critical Cosmopolitanism
- Chapter 4 Indulekha, or The Many Lives of Realism at the Fin de Siècle
- Chapter 5 Reading World Religions in the 1890s
- Chapter 6 Night Lights: The 1890s Nocturne
- Chapter 7 The Green 1890s:
- Chapter 8 “Only Nature Is a Thing Unreal”: The Anthropocene 1890s
- Chapter 9 Weird Ecologies and the Limits of Environmentalism
- Chapter 10 Queer Theories of the 1890s
- Chapter 11 Eugenics and Degeneration in Socialist-Feminist Novels of the Mid-1890s
- Chapter 12 The Conservative and Patriotic 1890s
- Chapter 13 Decadence and the Antitheatrical Prejudice
- Chapter 14 Religion and Science in the 1890s
- Chapter 15 Little Magazines and/in Media History
- Chapter 16 Fin-de-Siècle Visuality (and Textuality) and the Digital Sphere
- Index
Summary
This chapter extends the argument of anticolonial critics, such as Ania Loomba and Sylvia Wynter, to suggest that we think of race less as a distinct, autonomous category and more as an underpinning force contributing to the destabilizing elements of the fin-de-siècle social world. By expanding our theoretical framework to consider late-nineteenth-century manifestations of anti-Blackness, the chapter argues that we can enrich our mapping of the ways that “race” as an expansive category both propped up and disordered the British empire and thereby build on earlier critical interpretations of the workings of empire and difference in fin-de-siècle narratives. To help write toward this reframing, the author turns to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Story of the Brown Hand” (1899). This short tale about the ghost of an Afghan hillman haunting a British surgeon upon his return from Mumbai (“Bombay”) to Wiltshire teaches us how the brownness of Asians took shape through biocentric terms against the period’s longstanding anti-Blackness in ways that are historically specific but also ongoing in the present.
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- Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s , pp. 21 - 40Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023