In 1903 the practice of personal identification began a paradigm shift in America. It started with the arrival of a new inmate, Will West, at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. In processing West, the prison’s identification bureau followed the anthropometric method developed less than a quarter century before by Alphonse Bertillon (1853–1914) in Paris. Anthropometry, or Bertillonage, as it was also called, had quickly become the reigning method of personal identification in U.S. prisons. Typically supplemented by the powerful new technology of photography (Sekula 26–30), it organized precise bodily data (length of the head, foot, middle finger,...

Even as it exposes the futility of nineteenth-century efforts to read identity from the body through visual inspection—of hands, skin, finger marks, and other physical indices—Pudd’nhead Wilson flirts with the possibility that such epistemological certainty might nonetheless be found in a different bodily attribute manifesting in a different sensory register. Early in the novel, as he labors over “a set of tangled account books” (7), David Wilson is “disturbed” (8) by an animated conversation between a pair of unseen speakers. The conversation, which he overhears through an open window, goes like this:

“Say, Roxy, how does yo’ baby...

For its August 1995 issue, the alternative music magazine Spin sent a correspondent, appropriately named Eurydice, to San Francisco to explore an emerging sexual subculture, an offshoot of the S/M scene whose members, mainly women, engage in what they call “blood sports” (60). In local sex clubs promoting “safe blood play” (64), the reporter watches as young women insert open-topped hypodermic needles into the veins of their arms, splattering the room, and each other, with their jetting blood. “We love blood,” one proclaims. “It drives us mad” (66). A twenty-something Ivy League graduate tells Eurydice, “I get off being bitten”;...

A century ago, W. E. B. Du Bois took the historical, cultural, and ontological predicament of African American sorrow and made it the basis of a theory of black soul. This theory, which drew in roughly equal parts on the world-historical geist of Hegelian idealism and the animistic emphasis of West African spiritual systems, posited blackness as a distinct culture and consciousness formed by the accumulated weight of human misery across generations of diaspora, enslavement, rape, lynching, disfranchisement, economic exploitation, and institutionalized inequality, and by the collaborative expressive response to that legacy of alienation and suffering. Nowhere was that response,...

Katherine Anne Porter’s “Miranda stories”—“The Old Order,” “Old Mortality,” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider”—trace the coming of age of three generations of southern women in and against a turn-of-the-century plantation order in East Texas and, later, a modernizing mass society in World War I–era Denver. The stories find a central, unifying predicament in the struggle of their youngest initiate, Miranda Rhea, to draw on the history of her foremothers and the lessons of her own experience in order to arrive at a viable model of womanhood upon which to found a mature identity. Along the way, Miranda,...

When the subject is war, who has the knowledge, the authority—the right—to speak? Few questions can carry more civic, political, and moral urgency in an age such as ours, when war has come to threaten not just individual human lives but all human life and perhaps all life on Earth as well. We all have an enormous stake in who gets to talk about war or, more precisely, in who gets to be heard talking about it, pronouncing judgment on it, telling stories about it, defining it, declaring it—and declaring it ended. Over the centuries, soldiers, politicians,...

This book began with a rousing call for a body-oriented, materially grounded approach to the too-often idealized and over-intellectualized field of southern literary studies. The next six chapters, drawing on roughly a century of southern writing, mapped out an eclectic series of readings built on such an approach. For this concluding chapter, however, I will shift my focus to consider a text that itself explicitly foregrounds the critical practice of reading (for) the body that I have advocated here—foregrounds it, moreover, with a skepticism that borders on disdain. That text is Walker Percy’s brilliant, angry, provocative 1977 novel, Lancelot....