1847
A01=Nadja Durbach
anthropology
Author_Nadja Durbach
british culture
cannibal kings
Category=ATXC
Category=NHTB
conjoined twins
cultural otherness
cultural studies
deformity
disability
elephant man
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
european history
exploitation
freak show performers
freak shows
great britain
human bodies
imperial ideology
lalloo
missing link
modern history
modern identity
modern sensibilities
national identity
nonfiction
psychology
scientists
social history
social issues
social purpose
social purposes
Product details
- ISBN 9780520257689
- Weight: 544g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 13 Oct 2009
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In 1847, during the great age of the freak show, the British periodical Punch bemoaned the public's 'prevailing taste for deformity'. This vividly detailed work argues that far from being purely exploitative, displays of anomalous bodies served a deeper social purpose as they generated popular and scientific debates over the meanings attached to bodily difference. Nadja Durbach examines freaks both well-known and obscure including the Elephant Man; 'Lalloo, the Double-Bodied Hindoo Boy', a set of conjoined twins advertised as half male, half female; Krao, a seven-year-old hairy Laotian girl who was marketed as Darwin's 'missing link'; the 'Last of the Mysterious Aztecs' and African 'Cannibal Kings', who were often merely Irishmen in blackface. Upending our tendency to read late twentieth-century conceptions of disability onto the bodies of freak show performers, Durbach shows that these spectacles helped to articulate the cultural meanings invested in otherness - and thus clarified what it meant to be British - at a key moment in the making of modern and imperial ideologies and identities.
Nadja Durbach is Associate Professor of History at the University of Utah. She is the author of Bodily Matters: The Anti Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907.
