Domesticity Recap

1. Domesticity Recap • Large “take-away” points: • Domesticity serves as a “regulative norm” which configures relations between subjects and defines the their meaning (“duty” “freedom” “sympathy”) • Gender and domestic ideology “naturalize” certain social rules, categories, and hierarchies • Gender and domesticity also serve as the “symbolic terrain” upon which social conflicts of all types are waged

2. Abstract next Mon… What is your argument? • Do some preliminary analysis of your object. • Remember your critical questions. • Think to how you want to “respond” to your research sources.

3. “Slavery has never been represented, slavery never can be represented” - William Wells Brown

4. Walter Johnson • Johnson uses the epigraph by William Wells Brown to frame his argument about the importance of the term “slavery” in American Studies scholarship. • What is the nature of the “epistemological violence” that attends to histories of slavery? What is “forgotten” in nationalist rememberings of slavery?

5. Benito Cereno • Written by Herman Melville, published in 1855 • Historical context • Specter of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) • Rise of the radical abolitionist movement in 1830s • Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 • Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852

6. Benito Cereno • The novella is a mystery of sorts, or a thriller “with a twist.” • Seeing the events of the novel from Delano’s perspective, we (along with him) are not privy to the actual truth of the San Dominick. • Our first analytic task should be to go back over the “clues” that Melville gives us. • Here is the question: Why does Delano not become suspicious of the events aboard the ship?

7. Benito CerenoRecap Walter Johnson - “Memory and Forgetting” • Nationalist historiography participates in an “epistemological violence” (221) • Remembers the history of slavery as the story of progress from slavery to freedom (defined as participation in the wage economy and, later, formal, legal universality) • “an archaic pendant to the emergent future” (223) • “the temporal framing of the relationship of slavery to freedom as one of linear progress” (224) • Forgets the way that slavery and freedom were contemporaneous with each other and defined against one another

8. Close Reading “Benito Cereno” • Catalogue of Racial “False Consciousness”: “Such were the American’s thoughts. They were tranquilizing…” (193) • Page 166-67 • “a strange house with strange inmates in a strange land” • “the living spectacle…has…something of the effect of enchantment. The ships seems unreal; these strange costumes, gestures, and faces.” • “the particular love in negroes of uniting industry with pastime…” • “a black of small stature, in whose rude face, as occasionally, like a shepherd's dog, he mutely turned…”

9. Benito CerenoRecap • Registers the way that the symbols, stereotypes, and narratives that compose “slave ideology” meditate experience and encourage misrecognition of social realities. • The performance of the San Dominick is purposefully “scripted” to encourage this misrecognition and hide the rebellion in plain sight. • Also seems to register the impossibility of representing the Africans outside of these frameworks.

10. The Deposition • Offers to reveal the truth behind these misrecognitions, offering us a “true sight” in the events leading up to and during Delano’s narrative. • But Melville wants us to question this too! • He refers to the deposition as the “key” which opens the “lock” of Delano’s experience, “significant symbols, indeed.” • The last time we encountered these metaphors, they were being used to reassure us about the static and obvious nature of racial authority. It’s part of the “tranquilizer.”

11. The Deposition – Full-scale attack! • Rhetorical (think fall quarter): What is its argument and form of legitimate evidence? How does it construct its authority and on what terms? • Formal (think Ian Watt): What are its constitutive formal elements? Temporality? Narrative characteristics? • Ideology Critique (think Belsey): What are its constitutive assumptions? What power relations and systems of difference are expressed in its construction and forms of language?

12. "I think I understand you; you generalize, Don Benito; and mournfully enough. But the past is passed; why moralize upon it? Forget it. See, yon bright sun has forgotten it all, and the blue sea, and the blue sky; these have turned over new leaves." "Because they have no memory," he dejectedly replied; "because they are not human." "But these mild trades that now fan your cheek, Don Benito, do they not come with a human-like healing to you? Warm friends, steadfast friends are the trades." "With their steadfastness they but waft me to my tomb, Senor," was the foreboding response. "You are saved, Don Benito," cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished and pained; "you are saved; what has cast such a shadow upon you?" "The Negro." There was silence, while the moody man sat, slowly and unconsciously gathering his mantle about him, as if it were a pall.

13. As for the black -- whose brain, not body, had schemed and led the revolt, with the plot -- his slight frame, inadequate to that which it held, had at once yielded to the superior muscular strength of his captor, in the boat. Seeing all was over, he uttered no sound, and could not be forced to. His aspect seemed to say: since I cannot do deeds, I will not speak words. Put in irons in the hold, with the rest, he was carried to Lima. During the passage Don Benito did not visit him. Nor then, nor at any time after, would he look at him. Before the tribunal he refused. When pressed by the judges he fainted. On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo.