‘Melville knew the score’: ‘Benito Cereno’ as an index of Black Atlantic globality

Abstract

ABSTRACT 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.