Innovation and Stasis: Technology and Race in Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson

Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson demonstrates how technologies of identification attempt to counter how bodies evolve beyond previous constraints—in particular, the constraints of racial classification. Twain develops accounts of subjectivity and racial classification that cover an extraordinary breadth of genealogy, biology, and law, while still invoking elements of randomness and chance. The key to such combinations of fixity and emergence in human identity is the technology of fingerprinting. Twain's speculative engagement with fingerprinting creates a system and medium to classify and secure particular forms of identity, leading to the reassertion of racial values already inherent in science and technology, law, and commerce. Fingerprinting represents the direction that technologies of identity would seek to employ: a movement away from direct visual observation of bodies, whose emergence and change over time make them difficult to categorize, to reliance on archives of information that are increasingly removed from the contexts of meaning and emergence those bodies inhabit; this reflects "one drop" politics, as race becomes increasingly difficult to define visually. The archive itself, then, becomes infected with the spectacular vitality of, and the speculation and risk within, nineteenth-century biological and cultural determinism.