Full Description
Since the mid-nineteenth century, there has been a notable acceleration in the development of the techniques used to confirm identity. From fingerprints to photographs to DNA, we have been rapidly amassing novel means of identification, even as personal, individual identity remains a complex chimera. The Art of Identification examines how such processes are entangled within a wider sphere of cultural identity formation.
Against the backdrop of an unstable modernity and the rapid rise and expansion of identificatory techniques, this volume makes the case that identity and identification are mutually imbricated and that our best understanding of both concepts and technologies comes through the interdisciplinary analysis of science, bureaucratic infrastructures, and cultural artifacts. With contributions from literary critics, cultural historians, scholars of film and new media, a forensic anthropologist, and a human bioarcheologist, this book reflects upon the relationship between the bureaucratic, scientific, and technologically determined techniques of identification and the cultural contexts of art, literature, and screen media. In doing so, it opens the interpretive possibilities surrounding identification and pushes us to think about it as existing within a range of cultural influences that complicate the precise formulation, meaning, and reception of the concept.
In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Dorothy Butchard, Patricia E. Chu, Jonathan Finn, Rebecca Gowland, Liv Hausken, Matt Houlbrook, Rob Lederer, Andrew Mangham, Victoria Stewart, and Tim Thompson.
Contents
Introduction
Rex Ferguson, Melissa M. Littlefield, and James Pardon
Part 1: Genres of Identification
1. Charming Faces and the Problem of Identification
Matt Houlbrook
2. Identity Noir
James Pardon
3. "The Ghosts of Individual Peculiarities": Murder and Interpretation in Dickens
Andrew Mangham
4. "A Puzzle of Character": Francis Iles and Narratives of Criminality in the 1930s
Victoria Stewart
Part 2: The Body Captured
5. The Art of Identification: The Skeleton and Human Identity
Rebecca Gowland and Tim Thompson
6. Becoming More Biological: Ruth Ozeki and the Postgenomic Ethnoracial Novel
Patricia E. Chu
7. Identification Made Visible: Photographic Evidence and Russell Williams
Jonathan Finn
Part 3: Surveillant Technologies
8. The Face in the Biometric Passport
Liv Hausken
9. The Bourne Identification
Rex Ferguson
10. Identification and the "Intelligent City"
Dorothy Butchard
11. Jennifer Egan and the Database
Rob Lederer
Contributors
Index
