X-Rays, Probes, Fingers, and Noses: Empiricism in Rudolph Fisher's Detective Fiction

Abstract:Rudolph Fisher was not just a prominent Harlem Renaissance figure, he was also a medical doctor, a distinction literary critics neglect. In his short story "Skeeter" and detective works, The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem and "John Archer's Nose," Fisher advanced a holistic understanding of the Black body that developed out of his radiology practice. Fisher positions the Black body as capable of greater insight than the X-ray and related medical devices. Though Fisher does not fully dismiss medical technologies, he advocates a bodily empiricism over a technological empiricism. At the same time, in his detective fiction, Fisher creatively harnesses the X-ray, using its contrasts of dark and light—black and white—to produce a modernist aesthetics and compare theories of African American subjects. By introducing the X-ray to meditate on Black subjectivity, Fisher repurposes the detective genre and proposes a fresh epistemology.