Scales of Captivity: Racial Capitalism and the Latinx Child by Mary Pat Brady (review)

Abstract

The continued legacy of the novel’s formative links to Enlightenment Anthropology, extensively mapped by Ian Duncan’s recent Human Forms (Princeton Univeristy Press, 2019)? An opportunity to think Victorian Realism as in some surprising ways consonant with the anti-colonial genealogy of the human initiated by Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter? An indication of the realist novel’s anthropocentric limits in an era of global warming, as Amitav Ghosh has charged? If it leaves its readers without fully settling these questions, Brilmyer’s book also helps open them further as lines of inquiry for the study of the Victorian novel. Generous as well as generative, The Science of Character finally shares with the novels it analyzes an ability to make us see again both the dynamic complexity of human character and the open horizons of its relations and ramifications.