''I give the sign of democracy'': Race, labor, and the aesthetics of nationalism (Herman Melville, Walt Whitman)

My dissertation, “‘I Give the Sign of Democracy’: Race, Labor, and the Aesthetics of Nationalism,” explores the intricate relationship between race, labor, and nation in a group of selected texts by Herman Melville and Walt Whitman.; The first chapter, “In Transit: Contesting Space and Trans-Nationalism in ‘Benito Cereno’” explores how Melville volunteers the plight of captured Africans to meditate upon the meaning of freedom and citizenship by deploying various icons throughout the story. The chapter uncovers how ideas of the nation are conscripted onto various types of bodies (tactile, corporeal, truncated). Chapter Two, “Framing the Margins: Spatializing Democratic Discourse and the Aesthetics of Nationalism” discloses how Whitman eventuates an aesthetics of nationalism through sublimation. I reveal, however, that public and social arenas are delineated by space, physical or imagined, to mark and identify would-be constituents. “ Automatic for the People” the third chapter, contends that Melville's likening of wage labor to chattel slavery fully registers Melville's ambivalence about “ruthless democracy” in “The Bell-Tower” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” An interrogation of why some of Whitman's prose works from the same period, particularly 1856's “The Eighteenth Presidency!” do not share the full promissory vision of incorporation of Leaves of Grass, comprises Chapter Four. “Whitman's Lexicon of Nationalism: Prose and Politics” traces the difficulties in his non-fiction prose of creating an expansive “lexicon of nationalism” by moving beyond explaining his critique of slavery and his endorsement of annexation as the logically necessary and sequentially residual benefits of upholding the supreme legitimacy of America's white working class. The fifth and final chapter posits that the American historical romance works of Melville and Douglass, namely Isreal Potter and The Heroic Slave respectively, appropriate the rhetoric and imagery of the Revolution to underscore the contemporary moment of the Civil War crisis. “On Native Ground” examines territorial conceptions of the nation by questioning the idea of “home” against the mobility, if not transience, of the migratory self.