Babo's “Mute”-ny: Deaf Culture and Black Testimony in Antebellum America

Abstract

AbstractReaders of Benito Cereno, Melville's only story about slavery, have long debated whether the Black mutineers aboard the San Dominick are, as the narrator suggests, “voiceless.” This essay begins with the self-fashioned muteness of the rebellion's leaders to offer a new linguistic genealogy of the novella, unpacking how Melville uses the cultural and legal structures of muteness to reframe Black communication. The category mute organizes the story's description, characterization, dialogue, and mode and structures the conditions of possibility for Black testimony. Such lessons were, the story's publication context reveals, more available to Melville's original readers. In showing how cultural and legal structures associated with disability served as resources for Black rights, this essay reveals how structurally intersectional analysis can resurface central aspects of a text. The cultural and legal history of Deaf culture make sites of Black communication and the possibility of Black testimony in Melville's novella legible once more.