Dark side of the Republic: Blackness, imperial knowledge and the illusion of self-mastery in Herman Melville's America

My dissertation argues that blackness in Herman Melville's seminal fiction, which usually gets read by Melville's critics either exclusively as an allegory of moral evil or solely as a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery, is, in reality, the site where abstract philosophical concerns are relentlessly correlated with concrete social problems like colonization and slavery. The imperial, national, and often borderless backdrops of Herman Melville's Typee (1846), Moby-Dick (1851), Pierre (1852), and Benito Cereno (1855), which reach into the socio-politics of slavery, the cultural artifacts and philosophical commitments of New England, British and American missionary ethnographies (1831-1846), as well as into Renaissance humanistic philosophy, Biblical myths, and Calvinist religious imagery, offer an opportunity to bring together various histories of blackness. Throughout my dissertation I use these interrelated histories, both domestic and transnational, to analyze the polyvalence of social encounters marked by racial difference in Melville's fiction. Among the encounters that concern me are those that occur between Ishmael and Queequeg; Pip and Ahab; Tommo and the Typees; Isabel and Pierre; Babo and Don Benito. By reading social encounters marked by racial difference, I demonstrate that in Melville's fiction slavery and colonialism do not reveal the possibility of political solutions or new epistemologies, as other critics suggest, but instead they reveal the racialized violence of abstraction---an experience that ultimately renders any truth-based political reform or epistemological paradigms incoherent.