Description
Book SynopsisRacing the Street traces the history of how race was used as a technology for gathering, assembling, and networking the early cosmopolitan city. Drawing on an archive that ranges from engineering blueprints and parliamentary committee reports to sensationalistic pamphlets and periodical press accounts, Robert J. Topinka conducts an original genealogy of the nineteenth-century London street, demonstrating how race as a technology gathers, sorts, and assembles the teeming particularities of the street into a manageable network. This interdisciplinary study offers a novel approach to the intersections of race, rhetoric, media, technology, and urban government.
Trade Review"The primary virtue of this book is Topinka’s lucid and profound analyses. . . . Essentially insightful and provides a new take on matters of much relevance." * Journal of British Studies *
"An intriguing text that reveals what thinking about race and new materialism in the context of nineteenth-century London can do for contemporary rhetorical scholars." * Rhetoric Society Quarterly *
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
A Genealogy of Race as Technology
1. Sublime Streets, Savage City
Metonymy, the Manifold, and the Aesthetics of Governance
2. Sewers, Streets, and Seas
Types and Technologies in Imperial London
3. Moving Congestion on Petticoat Lane
Slums, Markets, and Immigrant Crowds, 1840–1890
4. Typical Bodies, Photographic Technologies
Race, the Face, and Animated Daguerreotypes
Epilogue
Catachresis, Cliché, and the Legacy of Race
Notes
Bibliography
Index
