Description: In this book, Sarah E. Chinn pulls together what seems to be opposite discourses--the information-driven languages of law and medicine and the subjective logics of racism--to examine how racial identity has been constructed in the United States over the past century. She examines a range of primary social case studies such as the American Red Cross' lamentable decision to segregate the blood of black and white donors during World War II, and its ramifications for American culture, and more recent examples that reveal the racist nature of criminology, such as the recent trial of O.J. Simpson. Among several key American literary texts, she looks at Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, a novel whose plot turns on issues of racial identity and which was written at a time when scientific and popular interest in evidence of the body, such as fingerprinting, was at a peak.
Review Quotes: "Technology and The Logic of American Racism is important not only for its analysis of racism in the US but also for its exploration of the relationships among the languages of science, law, literature and popular journalism. Chinn's work shows that students of the humanities have a significant contribution to make to the study of the impact of historical and contemporary scientific developments on the shape of US culture" Priscilla Wald, Duke University