“Benito Cereno” and Antebellum Epistemological Ideology
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By rereading the narrator’s perceptual failure to recognize the truth of black mutiny and governance on a slaver in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” this essay claims that his ignorance is emblematic of how Northerners and Southerners in antebellum America collectively thought of the black political governance as the impossible. Central to Melville’s shipboard slave-mutiny narrative is, I suggest, how inconceivable and unbearable the reality of a new racial hierarchy established would be to the white mind and body. In “Benito Cereno” Melville directs attention to the American captain’s perceptual process that precludes him from realizing what the inversion of the perceived natural racial hierarchy veils despite its explicit and implicit implications of what seems amiss aboard the ship. This ignorance is indicative of Melville’s contemporary Americans’ collective failure to conceive a full possibility of black sovereignty and governance in the future of racialized America. By examining how abolitionists, sympathizers, and racists in the antebellum North and South share an inability to imagine the epistemological and ideological impossible, I suggest “Benito Cereno” as a subversive political allegory that critiques Melville’s contemporaries who find no room in their political imagination and reality for what to come after the complete emancipation for blacks due to their shared epistemological ideology.
Abstract
By rereading the narrator’s perceptual failure to recognize the truth of black mutiny and governance on a slaver in Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” this essay claims that his ignorance is emblematic of how Northerners and Southerners in antebellum America collectively thought of the black political governance as the impossible. Central to Melville’s shipboard slave-mutiny narrative is, I suggest, how inconceivable and unbearable the reality of a new racial hierarchy established would be to the white mind and body. In “Benito Cereno” Melville directs attention to the American captain’s perceptual process that precludes him from realizing what the inversion of the perceived natural racial hierarchy veils despite its explicit and implicit implications of what seems amiss aboard the ship. This ignorance is indicative of Melville’s contemporary Americans’ collective failure to conceive a full possibility of black sovereignty and governance in the future of racialized America. By examining how abolitionists, sympathizers, and racists in the antebellum North and South share an inability to imagine the epistemological and ideological impossible, I suggest “Benito Cereno” as a subversive political allegory that critiques Melville’s contemporaries who find no room in their political imagination and reality for what to come after the complete emancipation for blacks due to their shared epistemological ideology.
참고문헌 (33)
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