Out of Touch investigates how skin has become a crucial but disavowed figure in 20th century literature, theory and cultural criticism. These discourses reveal the extent to which skin likewise figures in the emergence of visual technologies positioned at the heart of the contest between surface depth and, by extension, between Western globalization and identity politics. Skin itself comes into explicit focus, though, only after a half-century of alternating circulation and suppression in American discourses about colour-blindness, during which time colonialism elsewhere had begun to lose its...