| Contents |
Part I: The racial body -- Measuring racial difference -- Bumps on the head: from phrenology to physiognomy -- Head and body, skill and skeleton -- Part II: Race and nationalism -- Germans, Teutons and the Anglo-Saxon race -- Part III: Ancient Egyptians, Jews and the modern race -- Egypt's land: racial determinism and the art of the ancient world -- Semites: Jews and the Orient -- Part IV: Charles Darwin: evolution and the aesthetics of race -- The aesthetics of evolution: race, beauty and ugliness -- Part V: From race to eugenics: nations under threat -- France divided: from the Franco-Prussian war to the Dreyfus affair -- Eugenics and the defence of the white races -- Part VI: Into the twentieth century: race in the world -- The ape, the coon and the savage: from racial science to racist imagery -- Responses to racial science and eugenics. |
| Abstract |
""Race Is Everything' explores the spurious but influential ideas of so-called racial science in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries, and how art was affected by it. David Bindman looks at race in general, but with particular concentration on attitudes toward and representations of people of African and Jewish descent. He argues that behind all racial ideas of the period lies the belief that outward appearance--and especially skull shape, as studied in the pseudoscience of phrenology--can be correlated with inner character and intelligence, and that these could be used to create a seemingly scientific hierarchy of races. The book considers many aspects of these beliefs, including the skull as a racial marker; ancient Egypt as a precedent for Southern slavery; Darwin, race, and aesthetics; the purported "Mediterranean race"; the visual aspects of eugenics; and the racial politics of Emil Nolde." -- Provided by publisher. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 311-333) and index. |
| Genre/form | History. |
| ISBN | 9781789146967 hardcover |
| ISBN | 1789146968 hardcover |
