Capturing the individual: Race and forensics in American literature, 1894-1959

When Bigger Thomas turns frantic in his desire to escape the scene of Mary Dalton's murder, he experiences one surprising moment of calm: assuring himself that even if his fingerprints are detected inside Mary's room, "his fingerprints had a right to be there." Twelve years after Native Son (1940), another of Wright's fugitive protagonists, Cross Damon of The Outsider, has a similar moment while re-staging a murder scene to evade suspicion. Damon, like Bigger, also decides not to bother removing his fingerprints, assuring himself that even if detected "his prints had a right to be on the door." My dissertation, "Capturing the Individual: Race and Forensics in American Literature, 1894-1959," takes its cue from such pivotal moments, scenes in which forensic evidence condenses the troubled co-operation of individual identity, race, and rights during the era of Jim Crow.;My project claims that in this literature of race and crime science we find J. Edgar Hoover unwittingly contributing to the creation of the civil rights imagination by promoting forensic identification techniques throughout the years of racial segregation. Though the racial impact of this new kind of particularizing identification would not be felt in the American courtroom for many decades to come, the significance of the evidence appeared almost immediately in literature by some of the nation's most insightful writers on race: Mark Twain, Rudolph Fisher, William Faulkner, Richard Wright, and Chester Himes. My project argues that each of these author's experiments with the crime story dramatize the way that twentieth-century crime science, due to its own dependence on an ability to distinguish individuals from one other, had to admit the insufficiency of typologies that correlated criminal types with racial types. This project further demonstrates how a set of generic conventions, in which the speculative search for psychological motive must be reconciled with material evidence of the forensic trail, reveals the crime story as a literary form particularly suited to illuminate, and trouble, key aspects of Jim Crow ideology, particularly those that depend upon marking essential difference and thwarting the representativeness of non-white individual identity.