The Arresting Eye: Race and the Anxiety of Detection

by Jinny Huh

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813937021
Publisher:	University of Virginia Press
Publication date:	05/04/2015
Series:	Cultural Frames, Framing Culture
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations viii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Whispers of Norbury: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Modernist Crisis of Racial (Un)Detection 23

2 Intuitive Faculties and Racial Clairvoyance: Pauline Hopkins and the Emergence of Multiethnic Detective Fiction 53

3 Detecting Winnifred Eaton 83

4 Jaundiced Eyes: Charlie Chan and the Mysterious Disappearance of a Detective Hero 104

5 Race Detection in a Color-Blind Era: Musings on the New Millennium 144

Notes 171

Bibliography 187

Index 203

Editorial Reviews

" The Arresting Eye is a compelling study of twentieth-century American literary and cultural production that traces the intertwined relationship between the modes and representations of racial passing and detection. In bringing together the genres of the detective story and the passing narrative under the rubric of ‘racial detection,’ Huh makes a lucid and persuasive case as to how hegemonic constructions of ‘racial knowledge’ are always plagued by uncertainty and anxiety that, in turn, require ongoing scrutiny and negotiation. "—Crystal Parikh, New York University, author of An Ethics of Betrayal: The Politics of Otherness in Emergent U.S. Literatures and Culture

" The Arresting Eye opens arrestingly... with the narrative of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, mistakenly identified as the suspected terrorist Hussain Osman, a vivid example for addressing the detection of racial markers and the politics of identification and 'profiling.' "—author of American Literature

From the Publisher

The Arresting Eye is a compelling study of twentieth-century American literary and cultural production that traces the intertwined relationship between the modes and representations of racial passing and detection. In bringing together the genres of the detective story and the passing narrative under the rubric of ‘racial detection,’ Huh makes a lucid and persuasive case as to how hegemonic constructions of ‘racial knowledge’ are always plagued by uncertainty and anxiety that, in turn, require ongoing scrutiny and negotiation.

Crystal Parikh

The Arresting Eye opens arrestingly... with the narrative of the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, mistakenly identified as the suspected terrorist Hussain Osman, a vivid example for addressing the detection of racial markers and the politics of identification and 'profiling.'

American Literature