Racing the Street

Racing the Street traces the history of how race was used as a technology for gathering, assembling, and networking the early cosmopolitan city. Drawing on an archive that ranges from engineering blueprints and parliamentary committee reports to sensationalistic pamphlets and periodical press accounts, Robert J. Topinka conducts an original genealogy of the nineteenth-century London street, demonstrating how race as a technology gathers, sorts, and assembles the teeming particularities of the street into a manageable network. This interdisciplinary study offers a novel approach to the intersections of race, rhetoric, media, technology, and urban government.

Robert J. Topinka is Lecturer in Transnational Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London and recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for the project, “Politics, Ideology, and Rhetoric in the 21st Century: The Case of the Alt-Right.”

List of Figures
Acknowledgments

Introduction 
A Genealogy of Race as Technology

1. Sublime Streets, Savage City 
Metonymy, the Manifold, and the Aesthetics of Governance

2. Sewers, Streets, and Seas
Types and Technologies in Imperial London

3. Moving Congestion on Petticoat Lane 
Slums, Markets, and Immigrant Crowds, 1840–1890

4. Typical Bodies, Photographic Technologies
Race, the Face, and Animated Daguerreotypes

Epilogue 
Catachresis, Cliché, and the Legacy of Race

Notes 
Bibliography 
Index