Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780520257689)

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.

Author: Nadja Durbach
ISBN-10: 0520257685
ISBN-13: 9780520257689
Publisher: University of California Press
Language: English
Published: 10/13/2009
Pages: 288
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.15lbs
Size: 9.20h x 6.30w x 1.00d

Review Citation(s):
Chronicle of Higher Education 11/13/2009 pg. 18