Teaching in the Multiracial Classroom: Reconsidering Melville's "Benito Cereno"

Abstract

Available in all of the major anthologies of American literature, Melville's novella Benito Cereno (1855) has emerged as one of the most widely read and taught of his works. In large part, the relatively recent popularity of the text has to do with the fact that critics have come to recognize, over the past thirty years or so, that the novella powerfully and problematically addresses the politics of slavery and race in antebellum America; arguably, it is the pre-Civil War antislavery masterpiece. What I want to do here is discuss some of the problems I have encountered in teaching the novella in the multiracial classroom, and to use this discussion as a way of addressing the debate on multiculturalism. It needs to be emphasized that virtually every attack on multiculturalism, or on teachers who supposedly teach political correctness, works with synchronic models: these monoculturalist polemicists have little to say about how the vast majority of college professors have wrestled, and will continue to wrestle, with pedagogical issues over time. Thus Dinesh D'Souza, the best known of these polemicists, in his chapter on Teaching Race and Gender (194-228), simply calls attention, through the use of anecdotal examples, to what seem to be particularly egregious examples of misguided teaching by a group of unreflective, unself-conscious professors. (An emphasis on the synchronic is evident as well in attacks on multiculturalism in Changing Culture of the University, Berman and Kimball.) All of D'Souza's anecdotes (many of which are lifted from the Wall Street Journal) are drawn from a very short period of time, and all present a cartoonish picture of professors who, presumably for the rest of their careers, have locked themselves into a militant 1960s radical authoritarianism, a new form of McCarthyism from the Left. In this essay I want to complicate such a perspective through a diachronic account of one professor's teaching practices, focusing on my shifting responses to teaching (and reading) Benito Cereno over a nearly twenty-year period. sorts of negotiations I will be describing, though grounded in my personal struggles, are, I believe, much more truly representative of how the vast majority of the professoriate operates from day to day, from year to year, than the crowd-pleasing tales dished up by the monoculturalist polemicists. Not all that long ago, a mad, word-drunken reading and rereading of Melville's Moby-Dick propelled me to apply to graduate school with the hope of teaching Melville's masterpiece to similarly intoxicated souls. But the Melville text that came to obsess and haunt me--as a graduate student, critic, and teacher--was the more Spartan and austere Benito Cereno. Looking back now on this change in energies and sympathies, I can understand how, as an undergraduate, Melville's novella of a slave revolt had had no great impact on my literary (or political) consciousness. I had read the novella only once, as a brief and exotic excursion away from the more spectacular novels of Stendhal, Dickens, Tolstoy, and others, in an seminar called Colloquium on the History, language, Literature and Philosophy of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, taught by two of Columbia University's very best literature professors to a group of twelve students who knew, with that special self-regard of the honors undergraduate, that we were among Columbia's best and brightest. As I recall the thirty-and-some-odd minute segment of the class devoted to Benito Cereno, before we turned to the weightier matters of Conrad's Lord Jim, slavery was barely mentioned during the discussion--a discussion that was, as always, boisterously propelled forth by an unrestrained imbibing of hearty burgundy. Instead, we all agreed--we happy white males who, about ten minutes into our evening seminar, would pass through the gates of what Melville in 1855 called The Paradise of Bachelors--we all agreed that in Benito Cereno, Melville, metaphysical as ever, was using black and white symbolism to confront the reader with a universal truth: the reality of evil in the world. …