Blurred geographies of the Atlantic and Pacific seas in Herman Melville's “Benito Cereno”

Journal Article Reconsideration: Teaching in the Multiracial Classroom: Reconsidering Melville’s “Benito Cereno” Get access Robert S. Levine Robert S. Levine University of Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar MELUS, Volume 19, Issue 1, March 1994, Pages 111–120, https://doi.org/10.2307/467792 Published: 01 March 1994

The New American Temporality Studies:Narrative and National Times in the Nineteenth Century Holly Jackson (bio) Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America by Dana Luciano. New York: New York University Press, 2007. pp. 368. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper. Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century by Lloyd Pratt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. pp. 248, 6 illust. $55.00 cloth. In recent years, American literary studies has reevaluated the cultural politics of time in nineteenth-century texts. A spate of critical works have called for renewed attention to the role of print culture, long held to be instrumental to the consolidation of American identity through the cultivation of a shared national time characterized by both linear progress and synchronicity, in both disrupting and abetting the formation of national consciousness. A landmark intersection of this temporal turn and affect studies, Dana Luciano's Arranging Grief, winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for a First Book, mines a prodigious archive to analyze the development in the nineteenth century of an "affective chronometry: the deployment of the feeling body as the index of a temporality apart from the linear paradigm of 'progress'"; that is, uses of the body as a "timepiece" (1). She argues that emotional embodiment provided a slower, nonlinear time in contrast to national time: "As a newly rational and predominantly linear understanding of time came to dominate the West, the time of feeling, deliberately aligned with the authority of the spiritual and natural worlds, was embraced as a mode of compensation for, and, to some extent, of resistance to, the perceived mechanization of society" (6). Central to this study is Luciano's theorization of chronobiopolitics, [End Page 323] "the sexual arrangement of the time of life" (9). Historicizing the new embrace of grief in the nineteenth century, as opposed to the previous perception of excessive mourning as disobedience to divine will, she makes the surprising claim that grief was central to the deployment of sexuality. Examining the chronobiopolitics of domesticity, especially the mother-child relationship that reproduces subjects and connects the past to the future, she identifies a "reproductive/generational orientation at the heart of" a "sexual politics of time in the nineteenth century" (62). Taking "the dream-time of the maternal-filial connection" as an example, she indicates how alternate times can ultimately reinforce rather than challenge progressive national time (126). She writes, "[T]he mother's corporealized time takes form . . . against the linear time of history, naturalizing the economy from which it projects itself as a refuge" (127). Transporting readers into nineteenth-century grief culture, the first chapter analyzes consolation literature such as mourner's handbooks and printed sermons, which performed, according to Luciano, "the dual task of soliciting the feelings 'naturally' associated with loss and of shaping and regulating their social productivity" (32). Despite these attempts to control the disruptive potential of mourning, Luciano's reading of the poem "The Little Shroud" (1822) by Letitia Landon indicates that departures from productive time may not be so easily allayed. With characteristic expressivity, she observes, the story's "dilation on the painful pleasure of longing intimates that the sticky textures of attachment might tug against authoritative arrangements of time, pointing toward the buried traces of resistance that consolation worked to cover over" (63). Examining the bridge between personal mourning and national memorialization, Luciano describes the pedagogical task of monuments, "not to teach history but to instruct people how to feel about it . . . [T]he monument imposes closure on historical events by declaring for all time what they mean" (174). Expertly close reading texts ranging from Herman Melville's novella "Benito Cereno" (1855) to Horst Hoheisel's 1995 proposal to blow up Brandenburg Gate in Berlin to memorialize the Holocaust, Luciano theorizes countermonumentalism: both "the countermonumental vision—the assurance that past, present, and future are linked not in a single linear narrative but in an ever-evolving array—and the countermonumental impulse—the demand for historical memory to work through this linkage without relying on amnesia or subscribing to a redemptionist teleology" (171). In the address we know as "What to the Slave Is the 4th of...

While previous investigations of the black-white racial dichotomy in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” have taught us an incalculable amount, paying attention to the complex modalities of Orientalism, rebellion, and transpacific migration in the novella makes even more relevant previous analyses of the story’s engagement with transatlantic slavery and the Haitian Revolution in a global arena. This study proposes that Melville’s narrative of a transatlantic slave mutiny—punctuated by phantom Orientalist references to East Asia and the South Pacific—suggests the indispensable role that the Atlantic revolutions played in framing European and American imaginings of East Asia and the South Pacific. Melville’s employment of the gothic as an expression of incipient racial and cosmopolitan anxieties, along with his unique adaptation of the travelogue’s “prolonged promise” and temporality, expresses East Asia and the South Pacific as a foreboding source of racial alterity and links his East Asian–Pacific and African populations through an Orientalist frame. Conversely, Melville’s comparative juxtapositions of West African slaves and villainous Malay characters—figures associated in the antebellum US with Muslim origins—craft an alternative, cross-Islamic community identification for imperial resistance in his “strange history” of the Pacific. While postcolonial critics positively read Melville’s pluralistic collectivity in Moby Dick, Melville’s rebellious Malay phantoms in “Benito Cereno” and Moby Dick betray moments of Islamic racialism and the problems of a republic built on slavery and the imperialism of the Asia Pacific, as seen in the Philippine–American War and other future imperial endeavors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Modern and last glacial maximum sea surface δ 18O derived from an Atmospheric General Circulation Model

This essay considers how contemporary debates about the role of African Americans in cultural memories about emancipation are unconsciously rooted in how the field of American studies has taught antebellum cultural production. The essay argues that the operant teaching canon of resistance to enslavement has long privileged white benevolence and diasporic African failure, and thus distorted the widespread and tangible place of successful resistance in the antebellum American imagination. By grappling with the ways in which Melville’s text has long been deployed in American classrooms as a singularity, the essay moves to consider how reframing and rescaling ‘Benito Cereno’ as part of a much larger constellation of textual objects about resistance to enslavement might help shift the course of contemporary understandings about the complexities of the American past.

Herman Melville's novella Benito Cereno tells the “strange history” of a slave mutiny in the Pacific Ocean. In the novella, Melville retains the names of the American and the Spanish captains and of the small uninhabited island, in whose bay most of the action takes place. The story is narrated by an omniscient observer and presented as an uneven “triptych”, comprising three separate sets of events focusing in turn on Delano, Cereno and the relationship between the two. The San Dominick is Benito Cereno's ship in Melville's novella. Benito Cereno is Melville's most political work. For Melville, the future of anticolonial revolution, along with the prospect of establishing a new postcolonial order, is grim.

Reviewed by: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire Shelley Streeby Keywords Shelley Streeby, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire, María Deguzmán, American Literature, American Identity, American History, Spain, Anglo-American Identity, Spanish-Americans, Multiculturalism Deguzmán, María. Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. 372 pp. This book is an ambitious survey of US literature and visual culture, from the late eighteenth century through the 1990s, that foregrounds how “figures of Spain” served as foils for an “Anglo-American identity” understood as “transcendentally or transparently ‘American’” (xii). DeGuzmán begins by arguing that, since the 1980s, a multiculturalist paradigm has dominated American literary and cultural studies. This framework, she suggests, has ironically obscured the existence of “a hegemonic ethnic group in the United States”: the “Anglo-American” (xii). She further suggests that the construction of an Anglo-American identity has crucially depended on figures of Spain. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, especially Freud and Lacan, she argues that figures of Spain functioned as “alter egos in the development of ‘American’ imperial identity” (xvii). Throughout US history, she writes, figures of Spain have been “central to the dominant fictions of ‘American exceptionalism,’ revolution, manifest destiny, and birth/rebirth; to Anglo-America’s articulation of its empire as anti-empire (the ‘good’ empire that is not one); and [End Page 402] to its fears of racial contamination and hybridity” (xii). She begins with the literature of the early US republic and the American Renaissance, then moves to the Spanish-Cuban-American War era, next to expatriate US modernist writers from the 1920s to the 1950s, then to “postmodern” literature, film, and photography, including work by Spaniards and Spanish “transplants” to the United States, and finally, turns to late-twentieth-century work by Latina/o writers that uses representations of Spain to respond to US empire and imagine postcolonial identities. Although she suggests that a “double movement” of “romancing” and “repulsion” (xiii) has shaped such figures, for most of the book the emphasis is on the latter, as DeGuzmán examines forms of Anglo-American literature and culture that position Spain as a “vanquished imperialist over and around whose abjected body the Anglo-American empire might be erected” (xxv). The first chapter, “The Shadow of the Black Legend,” explores several examples of canonical US literature in order to examine what she calls “the blackened figure of alien whiteness, the Spaniard” (1). The decision to begin with the literature of the American Renaissance is a little puzzling, for aside from Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” Spain and Spaniards play a relatively minor role in these texts, which were not popular at the time. Much more widely read and influential were W. H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico, where Spain and Spaniards are central, as well as dozens of cheap novelettes about Spaniards and Spanish America (including many in the gothic mode, DeGuzmán’s main subject here) that were part of an emergent mass culture. DeGuzmán argues that Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Poe’s “William Wilson” and “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and Melville’s novella all “manifest an increasingly explicit conjunction of metaphysical and physical taxonomies and thus the progressive racialization of crime culminating in the transformation of the shadow of the Black Legend into a stain” (63). In other words, in this chapter the focus is on how canonical US writers drew on the Black Legend in order to construct racialized figures of Spain that helped to fortify an emerging Anglo-American and national identity. In the next chapter, DeGuzmán turns from the Black Legend to Orientalism, “the major mode through which Spain, Spaniards, and ‘Spanishness’ were made to signify” (70) in the nineteenth century. While the Orientalized mode “revolved around the fantasy of a colonized or subjugated and exoticized Other” rather than a “hated and feared rival” (70), it still subordinated Spain within imperial hierarchies and produced a sense of US “entitlement” and “aggression” (71). In particular, DeGuzmán suggests, Anglo-American imperial discourse in its orientalizing mode...

ABSTRACTHerman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno” (1855/56) is one of the best-studied texts both within Melville’s oeuvre and nineteenth-century American literature in general. In recent decades, its puzzling structure and fragmented narrative perspective as well as its symbolism and themes have been subject to critical scrutiny mostly in the context of inquiries into the text’s racial politics regarding the institution of slavery. More specifically, the canonical tale about a slave uprising on the ship San Dominick, its detection by a Massachusetts-born captain and its consequences, has been discussed in the context of Paul Gilroy’s black Atlantic paradigm. Few readings of the tale consider the significance of the Pacific setting of a story grounded in the transatlantic slave trade but happening far away from the center of American slavery. Taking a fresh look at Melville’s tale, this essay focuses on its translation of (black) Atlantic subject matters and epistemologies onto the Pacific. Not only do I read the tale as both an Atlantic and a Pacific text, demonstrating that the institution of slavery and its specters know no geographical borders in Melville’s imagination; I also argue that piracy is an important trope in this context. Anticipating the shift of piracy cases and slavery to the Pacific towards the end of the nineteenth century, it both recalls a black Atlantic and predicts a bleak Pacific of violent imperial scenarios that would come to characterize US–Pacific relations.

Reviewed by: Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire Kirsten Silva Gruesz María DeGuzmán, Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. xxxiii + 372 pp. Spain's Long Shadow is a bold and at times brilliant study, although not all of its arguments are developed with equal persuasiveness. Ambitious both in its two-century chronological range and its effort to read visual forms of representation such as painting, political cartoons, photography, and film, the book contends that from the very inception of the U.S., "Anglo-American identity has been dependent on Spain. Figures of Spain have been central to the dominant fictions of revolution, manifest destiny, birth/rebirth, and 'American' exceptionalism in general" (289). Although its primary audience would thus seem to be located among U.S. Americanists, there is much here to engage Hispanists, and Latina/o Studies scholars in particular. Professor DeGuzmán calls it, in fact, "a kind of Latina/o criticism, where 'Latina/o' functions as a perspective, a subjectivity, rather than a sociological object of study" (xxx). Indeed, some of the book's most provocative claims arise from its concluding survey of the way that Latina/o writers have self-consciously distanced themselves from "Spanishness." Much postcolonial theory seeks to bring psychoanalytic and Marxist frameworks together, but investigations into the process of collective identity formation tend to lean more heavily on one tradition than the other. Freud clearly dominates here. Professor DeGuzmán describes the development of U.S. attitudes toward Spain and Spaniards as a process that oscillates between extremes of disavowal and identification: what gets symbolically repudiated through the familiar tropes of the Black Legend will later be reformulated as an object of Orientalist desire, as in exotic morisco fantasies. During the era when Spanish power still posed an apparent threat to the new republic, she writes, "Anglo-Americans created a fantasy of racial purity through the representation of Spaniards as figures of morally blackened alien whiteness or off-whiteness and doomed hybridity" (xxiv). Spain functioned as an older rival power, an "alter ego/imago" in Lacanian terms. Thus, during the nineteenth century, "figures of Spain and Spaniards operate[d] as a third term or bridge between historically constructed subject/object positions" such as white/black, Old/New World (xxv). When, at the turn of the century, that empire retreated from the Caribbean and the Pacific in the face of U.S. expansionism, [End Page 438] the representational burden on "Spain" was only intensified, for "the life of the symbol depends on the death of the thing" (xvii). Modernist and postmodernist writers, she argues with reference to Freud's model of totem and taboo, assigned Spain the work of restoring to enervated expatriates their primitive essences, their authentic selves. Such broad claims about the cultural landscape are by nature highly speculative ones that hinge not only on the power of textual readings, but the logic of their selection—on the strength of the case that can be made for their representativeness. Chapter 1, "The Shadow of the Black Legend," focuses on Charles Brockden Brown's early-national romance Wieland (1798), three of Poe's short stories, and Melville's "Benito Cereno" (1855): all classic meditations on identity written in the Gothic mode, whose characteristic doubles and shadows are suggestively read as emblems of Spain. Melville's novella obviously constitutes a deep engagement with Spanish identity, language, and politics, and her reading of it correctively restores the imperial contest to the forefront of this text, which has recently become a touchstone for discussions of the transnational dimensions of U.S. slavery. Wieland's link to Spain seems at first more circumstantial, but Professor DeGuzmán pulls off a bravura reading of the shadowy character of Carwin, who claims Spain as his "adopted" country. The discussion of Poe is somewhat less convincing when it unspools a reading of "William Wilson" (1839) on the basis of a single thread: the fact that the doppelganger wears a "Spanish cloak" to a masquerade. The effort to identify him as a Spaniard, as Wilson's (Anglo-America's) imperial...

Reviewed by: Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao Nicholas Spengler XINE YAO Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. ix + 304 pp. In his once obscure but now oft-cited study of Melville, C. L. R. James identifies Babo, the Black rebel leader of “Benito Cereno” (1855), as “the most heroic character in Melville’s fiction . . . a man of unbending will . . . a man of internal power” (Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Hanover: UP of New England, 2001. p. 112). Roughly seven decades after James penned these words from a detention center on Ellis Island, Xine Yao has given us a language and a framework for understanding such “internal power” not just as perseverance or intelligence but also as “disaffection” and “unfeeling”: a cultivated and calculated withdrawal from the dubious benefits of white sympathies and from the imperative to be affectively recognizable and responsive as a prerequisite to inclusion within the Western model of “universal” humanity. In lieu of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s sentimental model of “feeling right” as the affective engine for social justice, Yao proposes the disaffected model of “feeling otherwise” (6) to imagine alternative and insurgent forms of relation and political belonging. To this end, Yao moves beyond what she calls the “deracinated universality” (9) of Affect Studies itself, drawing on postcolonial, feminist, and queer of color scholars as theorists of feeling overlooked by the discipline. Yao’s heroic characters emerge from a varied assemblage of American texts of the long nineteenth century: they are revolutionary figures of “unsym-pathetic Blackness,” such as Babo and Henry Blake, from Martin Delany’s Blake; or the Huts of America (1861); they are white women doctors manifesting “queer frigidity” in novels such as Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay (1882); they are Black women medical professionals marked by “Black objective passionlessness” like the titular heroine of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892); and they are figures of “Oriental inscrutability” in the writings of Sui Sin Far, including her collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). While these categories are pejorative stereotypes from the perspective of white [End Page 44] sentimentalism and universalist humanism, Yao’s readings show how these characters (and, in many cases, their authors) reclaim apparently negative affects as strategic tools through which to insulate themselves from and even rebel against the racialized and gendered hierarchies that rely on these apparently comprehensive modes of thinking, feeling, and being. “These antisocial affects may be perceived as such only because their insurgent potential offers a way out of dominant ways of being and enabling new structures of feeling to arise” (12), Yao writes. To be “disaffected” or “unfeeling,” then, is not to be affectless but rather to refuse a subordinate position in existing sentimental hierarchies. As Yao puts it in her reading of “Benito Cereno”: “The corollary to the uncivilized reactive feelings attributed to racialized and colonized peoples is the paradoxical fear of their affective agency: the fear that, like Babo and his people, underneath the appearance of affectability they might be unfeelingly disaffected from the biopolitics of feeling” (52). What unites these figures is not a coherent or uniform theory of insurgent affect across different marginalized groups but rather Yao’s use of “unfeeling” to describe “a range of affective modes, performances, moments, patterns, and practices that fall outside of or are not legible using dominant regimes of expression” (11). These modes vary widely based on the lived experiences of their practitioners–some are carefully guarded while others are overtly insurrectionary, some translate readily into political action while others are stubbornly “counteractive”–but as Yao points out this variety is “a methodological strength” since “their unruly and difficult convergences resist the homogenizing discourse of universal feeling” (28). Such convergences mark a shift away from “colonial intimacies” (15)–the racialized affective hierarchy instantiated by the white New Englander Delano’s description of the enslaved Babo as a “faithful fellow” and “friend” (NN Piazza Tales 57) to the Spanish (American) Cereno–to what Yao calls “counterintimacies” (15), alternative affinities both within and across marginalized groups, such...

Anomalies of sea surface temperature (SST) and heat storage in the upper 400 m of ocean (HS400) for 13 years from 1979 to 1991 are mapped onto a 2° latitude by 5° longitude grid each month over most of the global ocean from 30°S to 60°N. Time sequences at every grid location are band pass filtered to reveal El Niño‐Southern Oscillation (ENSO) signals on period scales ranging from 2 to 7 years. Time‐distance diagrams are constructed along the equator and eastern boundary of the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and South Indian Oceans. These time‐distance diagrams display slow poleward propagation of equatorial ENSO signals, consistently in HS400 and intermittently in SST. In the North Pacific Ocean, ENSO signals in HS400 take 9–18 months to propagate from the equator northward along the west coast of North America to the Gulf of Alaska. In the North Atlantic Ocean, ENSO signals in HS400 take 6–12 months to propagate from the equator along the west coast of Africa to the Strait of Gibraltar. In the South Indian Ocean, ENSO signals in HS400 take 9–18 months to propagate poleward from the equator along the west coasts of Indonesia and Australia to Perth. Speeds of poleward propagation of ENSO waves in both HS400 and SST along these eastern boundaries range from 5 to 30 cm s−1. These ENSO boundary waves propagate in the same direction as Kelvin waves, but with speeds an order of magnitude smaller. They provide a remote and delayed influence upon ENSO activity in the middle‐latitude eastern boundary in each ocean. Time‐distance diagrams are also constructed along the western boundary and equator of the North Pacific, North Atlantic, and South Pacific Oceans. These time‐distance diagrams display slow propagation of ENSO signals in SST and HS400 in both directions depending on the ocean. In the North Pacific Ocean, ENSO signals in both SST and HS400 propagate equatorward from Taiwan to New Guinea, taking 6–18 months to make this transit. Moreover, they arrive on the equator in phase with zonally propagating equatorial ENSO waves. This indicates that ENSO activity in the western subtropical North Pacific Ocean influences ENSO activity in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean through slow equatorward propagation. Speeds of equatorward propagation of ENSO waves in both HS400 and SST along this western boundary range from 5 to 20 cm s−1. In the North Atlantic and South Pacific Oceans this off‐equatorial influence is not possible, since slow ENSO waves in HS400 propagate poleward along these western boundaries.

An evaluation of Pacific and Atlantic Ocean sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and continental U.S. streamflow was performed to identify coupled regions of SST and continental U.S. streamflow variability. Both SSTs and streamflow displayed temporal variability when applying the singular value decomposition (SVD) statistical method. Initially, an extended temporal evaluation was performed using the entire period of record (i.e., all years from 1951 to 2002). This was followed by an interdecadal‐temporal evaluation for the Pacific (Atlantic) Ocean based on the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO)). Finally, an extended temporal evaluation was performed using detrended SST and streamflow data. A lead time approach was assessed in which the previous year's spring‐summer season Pacific Ocean (Atlantic Ocean) SSTs were evaluated with the current water year continental U.S. streamflow. During the cold phase of the PDO, Pacific Ocean SSTs influenced streamflow regions (southeast, northwest, southwest, and northeast United States) most often associated with El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO), while during the warm phase of the PDO, Pacific Ocean SSTs influenced non‐ENSO streamflow regions (Upper Colorado River basin and middle Atlantic United States). ENSO and the PDO were identified by the Pacific Ocean SST SVD first temporal expansion series as climatic influences for the PDO cold phase, PDO warm phase, and the all years analysis. Additionally, the phase of the AMO resulted in continental U.S. streamflow variability when evaluating Atlantic Ocean SSTs. During the cold phase of the AMO, Atlantic Ocean SSTs influenced middle Atlantic and central U.S. streamflow, while during the warm phase of the AMO, Atlantic Ocean SSTs influenced upper Mississippi River basin, peninsular Florida, and northwest U.S. streamflow. The AMO signal was identified in the Atlantic Ocean SST SVD first temporal expansion series. Applying SVD, first temporal expansions series were developed for Pacific and Atlantic Ocean SSTs and continental U.S. streamflow. The first temporal expansion series of SSTs and streamflow were strongly correlated, which could result in improved streamflow predictability.

Minding the Body: Benito Cereno and Melville’s Embodied Reading Practice Matthew Rebhorn Almost every aspect of Herman Melville’s 1855 Benito Cereno contributes to the menacing atmosphere aboard the ghostly San Dominick: Atufal’s theatrical scene of contrition, the slave’s attack on a Spanish sailor, the tossing of a knot to Delano, and, perhaps most famously, Babo’s shaving of Benito Cereno in the cuddy. Crafted with such sinister effect, these events do two things simultaneously. First they reveal that there is another narrative, an “inside narrative,” to borrow a phrase from Melville’s Billy Budd, on board the San Dominick that flickers at the edge of Delano’s clouded vision. Second they offer the savvy reader distinct opportunities to unravel the gnarled lines of the narrative. As most critical studies of the story have suggested, however, our failure to unknot the narrative–to separate the inside narrative from the outside one–merely clarifies the way our reading practices, like Delano’s, are implicated in the narratives of power.1 This essay focuses on another one of these deeply meaningful moments from the narrative. Near the beginning of Benito Cereno, when Delano is invited to accompany Cereno on the upper deck, Melville relates: As during the telling of the story, Captain Delano had once or twice started at the occasional cymballing of the hatchet-polishers, wondering why such an interruption should be allowed, especially in that part of the ship, and in the ears of an invalid; and moreover, as the hatchets had anything but an attractive look, and the handlers of them still less so, it was, therefore, to tell the truth, not without some lurking reluctance, or even shrinking, it may be, that Captain Delano, with apparent complaisance, acquiesced in his host’s invitation. The more so, since with an untimely caprice of punctilio, rendered distressing by his cadaverous aspect, Don Benito, with Castilian bows, solemnly insisted upon his guest’s preceding him up the ladder leading to the elevation; where, one on each side of the last step, sat for armorial supporters and sentries two of the ominous file. Gingerly enough stepped good Captain Delano between [End Page 157] them, and in the instant of leaving them behind, like on running the gauntlet, he felt an apprehensive twitch in the calves of his legs. (58–9) This moment has not been given the critical attention the others have, one imagines, because nothing really happens here, certainly nothing so theatrical as the scenes mentioned earlier: there is no barely contained violence, no exotic ritual, no melodramatic charade. Yet this scene’s rather innocuous set of events effectively communicates a crucial aspect of Melville’s writing, even as it throws a new, revealing light on Melville’s antebellum American culture. This moment is emblematic of Delano’s espousal of rational discourse throughout the narrative to solve the mystery onboard the ship even as it reveals that the tale’s “inside narrative” and its critique of our reading practices are actually one and the same. We can witness the failure of this rational discourse in the moment I have singled out from Melville’s text in two ways–in its confusing rhetoric and, ironically, in its strange silences. Consider the following: “[M]oreover, as the hatchets had anything but an attractive look, and the handlers of them still less so, it was, therefore, to tell the truth, not without some lurking reluctance, or even shrinking, it may be, that Captain Delano, with apparent complaisance, acquiesced in his host’s invitation” (58–9). Deployed by Melville to underscore Delano’s confusing narration, the structure of this sentence is tangled and confused; the subordinate phrases obscure the main point of the clause; the commas act not as speed bumps but rather as bumpers that send the language ricocheting off along numerous tangents; and the double negative (“not without”) and qualifications (“to tell the truth” and “it may be”) blur a rather simple description of Delano’s lurking fear. Melville emphasizes here at Delano’s expense how discourse is failing to be rational: the more language we get here from our narrator, the more information we as readers expect from more...

The Moral Economies of American Authorship: Reputation, Scandal, and the Nineteenth-Century Literary MarketplacePlagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions

Introduction Shirley Samuels (bio) Culture in the nineteenth-century United States always involved images. From the engravings of presidential faces circulated in newspapers to the broadsides of recruiting posters in war times, from the circulating cartes-des-visites that carried a simulacrum of identity by means of the newly developed technology of the photograph to the portrait paintings of Mary Cassatt and Thomas Eakins, from the crowds standing in line to view the statue of “The Greek Slave” to the everyday use of coins and stamps, the relation between particular representational images and the mass commodification of portraits in common use has made some of these, still prevalent, uses of the image recognizable as a trade in visibility. The nineteenth century became accustomed to images in public display in ways that make the relation of imaging technologies and modern identifications of the subject inescapable. To what potential crises of identity does this lead? The purpose of the cluster of essays in this forum is to expose relations of identity and race that are conveyed by the use of imaging technologies in architecture, scientific discourse, music, theater, and, finally, in the hands of a twenty-first-century visual commentary on the racial practices of the nineteenth-century United States. Throughout these essays, the juxtapositions with literary practice involve some of the nineteenth century’s most familiar writers, such as Herman Melville and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the technologies of performance involving theater and music. Emphatically, the difference made by these essays is also to bring in sound, the movement of bodies on a stage and in dance, and the acts [End Page 119] of witness engaged in by audiences up to and including this past summer when viewers lined up in Brooklyn to see Kara Walker’s A Subtlety. The exposure of bodies to the viewing audience leads to questions about race and visibility that we have only begun to consider. That is, the relation of sight to literary culture is not static, nor, of course, limited to the nineteenth century, and these essays remind us to watch out! In the first essay, Irene Cheng takes us to a familiar location, Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, to ask about how architectural design might invoke racial visions. The second essay, by Christine Yao, treats Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno; it investigates scientific racialism and the peculiar developments of phrenological readings of heads as it looks at Babo’s head from a new angle. In the third essay, Alex Black calls attention to musical notation in the archive of sheet music that accompanied theatrical performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. The fourth, by Brigitte Fielder, considers how the movement of bodies might be constructed in an interpretation of how “the waltz and the march produce bodies in motion.” The “event of the integrated ball” meant that the movement of bodies might result in more than one kind of racial mixture. Finally, the fifth essay, by Janet Neary, looks at Kara Walker’s 8 Possible Beginnings to think about the legacy of nineteenth-century slavery practices in visual terms. In foregrounding vision as a formatting of the racial contract in the nineteenth-century United States, these essays foreground both the sense of a cultural contract and of the contrast that vision makes with literary representation. The contract about vision that was slowly established in the nineteenth century’s attention to the photograph involved a concept of reality and truth telling. In these short essays, we find historical incidents and cultural events that invoke both the contracts of race and the contracts of vision. To take an example not included in this set of essays, a novel like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred (1856) contains a vision both alluded to and withheld in the scene that combines the sight of near-white children with the pathos of the mother who will kill them to keep them from being sold into slavery. As a novel, Dred juxtaposes attention to the law with scenes infused with sentimental pathos, and yet the effect of the pathos is to distract from the violent cruelty of the moments where women and children are hunted down or starved. These moments...