Abstract
Abstract: This essay argues that Herman Melville's 1855 novella, Benito Cereno, serves as a historical model for thinking through the construction of paranoid narrative in the 9/11 Commission Report. Melville's text invites a consideration of slavery's role in the preservation of status quo politics, and reveals the means by which the disclosure of secrecy becomes a condition for the legal fiction of slavery to persist. In purporting to reveal the hidden plot of contemporary anti-US terrorism, the US government's 9/11 Commission Report similarly manufactures an acceptable political fiction that compensates for a still deeper failure to promote democratic structures of feeling in response to national trauma.
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