Art of Identification Forensics, Surveillance, Identity
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Rex Ferguson is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham.
Melissa M. Littlefield is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
James Purdon is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of St Andrews.
<p>“While there is now a growing literature on identification, there is no volume, as far as I know, so firmly rooted in literary studies, as compared to historical approaches. <i>The Art of Identification</i> makes a significant, original, and novel contribution to the literature.”</p><p>—Simon Cole, author of <i>Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification</i></p>
<p>“In a world increasingly dominated by technological forms of human surveillance, identification, and profiling, it is ever more important to examine how such processes affect how we feel and understand ourselves and others. The exciting essays in <i>The Art of Identification </i>are a signal contribution to this task. The collection will fascinate humanities scholars, scientists, and AI ethicists alike.”</p><p>—Edward Higgs, author of <i>Identifying the English: A History of Personal Identification 1500 to the Present</i></p>
<p>“The collection provides thoughtful examinations of the Western surveillance state and how individuals are defined within it, with applications ranging from government to the arts and sciences.”</p><p>—Sara Collins <i>Biography</i></p>
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.
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
AnthropoScene is a book series published in collaboration with the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. While not all scientists have accepted the term “anthropocene” as part of the geological timescale, the idea that humans are changing the planet and its environments in radical and irreversible ways has provoked new kinds of cross-disciplinary thinking about relationships among the arts, human technologies, and nature. This is the broad, cross-disciplinary basis for books published in AnthropoScene.
Books in this series include specialized studies for scholars in a variety of disciplines as well as widely accessible works of interest to broad audiences. They examine, in a variety of ways, relationships and points of intersection among natural, biological, and applied sciences and literary, visual, and performing arts. The AnthropoScene series represents the depth and breadth of work being done by scholars in literature, science, and the arts, putting innovative juxtapositions within reach of specialists and non-specialists alike.
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Rex Ferguson is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham.
Melissa M. Littlefield is Professor in the Department of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
James Purdon is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of St Andrews.