The DissemiNation of “Benito Cereno”; or A Polychromatic Experiment in Bhabhaian Syntax, Brought Forth in Good Faith by the Author

“If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between vocabularies, then what effect does this have on narratives and discourses that signify a sense of ‘nationness’: the heimlich of pleasures of the hearth, the unheimlich terror of the space or race of the Other; the comfort of social belonging, the hidden injuries of class; the customs of taste, the powers of political affiliation; the sense of social order, the sensibility of sexuality; the blindness of bureaucracy, the strait insight of institutions; the quality of justice, the common sense of injustice; the langue of the law and the parole of the people.” (Bhabha Nation and Narration 2)

(Author's Note: Colors above will correspond with those below.)

In posing this question above, Homi Bhabha simultaneously provides an answer to how one might go about discerning the narration of nation, or narrating the narration of nation.  If he characterizes this process as existing in the collective iteration of every item on the list above, its deep construction, its seemingly (at times) insurmountable conceptual nuance, then Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (as if it were planned this way) proves an undeniable participant in this process:  Delano’s (or “Jack of the Beach’s”) heimlich remembrances of his household boat and life back in the US, the unheimlich terror—“now with scales dropped from his eyes”—of the San Dominick’s transformation from a strange boat with docile slaves and sickly crew worthy of his charity into the place of flying hatchets and hidden daggers from the Africans Delano had reflected so kindly on (if comparable to the dumb devotion of a “Newfoundland dog”); the comfort of Delano naturally belonging above the slaves alongside Don Cereno as a fellow captain (taking lunch together, discussing routes, etc.), Delano’s simultaneous assessment of Cereno’s ineptitude and discourteousness as a captain being perhaps due to his Spanishness or otherwise “ill-breeding”; the customs of captain-to-captain exchange Delano expects (a more welcoming demeanor, a personal farewell upon his departure), the narrator’s (and by extension American captain’s) frequent reflections on national identity—“But as a nation—continued [Delano] in his reveries—these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it” (179)—with his suspicions emblemized so richly by the rag-flags in the cuddy during the shaving scene, in which national distinctions are discarded as fabric yet make possible the ruse of the mutineers, themselves tying their hopes to reaching the nation of Senegal; the American captain’s hyper-awareness of the bizarre social hierarchy of racially marked Spaniards, mulattoes, Black Africans, and sickly Spanish Captain on the San Dominick, the acknowledgement of scantily-clad “negresses” sleeping “like a doe” and occupying the lowest place of social order on the ship; the methodically litigious reckoning of Benito Cereno’s deposition to the Peruvian authorities, the church providing Delano and Cereno’s ultimate sense of institutional legitimation; the story’s ending on a complex sense of embodied retributive justice (Babo’s head on a spit, Cereno’s skeleton in the crypt), a slight acknowledgement of the harshness of the slave trade coupled with a tacit assumption of an African’s "natural" disposition to servitude; Bhabha’s “langue of the law”—“I, Don Jose De abos and Padilla, His Majesty’s Notary for the Royal Revenue…Do certify and declare, as much as is requisite in law, that, in the criminal cause commenced the twenty-fourth of the month of September, in the year seventeen hundred and ninety-nine…” (207); and “parole of the people”—“On the testimony of the sailors alone rested the legal identity of Babo” (222-3). 

Each of these aspects in Melville’s story reflects a national consciousness not centered in a specific “nation” (largely made possible by the maritime setting) yet absolutely concerned with an orientation to one’s national identity—Senegalese, Spanish, American—that sets in motion Delano’s ruminations on what he sees while aboard the San Dominick.  The nation, as Bhabha demonstrates so well, informs the personal, and in so doing the person, simultaneously, makes the “Janus-faced” narration of nation. 

Blake, OR the Emancipatory Transnational Economies of America

We often place Martin Delany’s significance in his early conception of Black Nationalism and commitment to the notion of resettlement in other countries, and this week’s readings of Blake do a nice job of using transnational methodologies to lend nuance to how the writer saw this playing out through his fiction.  Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo rightly points to an approach in Blake that seeks a transnational synthesis of hemispheric black freedom while utilizing a cosmopolitan knowledge of individual national custom and practice: “Blake is supranational in that nation-state borders are repeatedly transgressed, blurred, and negated, and differences between individuals and groups residing in disparate countries are frequently represented as nonexistent, minor, or irrelevant. At the same time, Blake is a profoundly nationally oriented text” (582). Delany’s pre-occupation with borders throughout the text is somehow able to simultaneously register as transnationally driven yet profoundly conscious of national difference.  One of the ways, I argue, the text expresses this dual commitment is through Henry’s insistence of the emancipatory power of money and capital. Martin Delany compares the emancipatory power of money between that of Cuba and the United States to further argue for the transnational future of the African American community. 

Somebody named Andy Doolen rightly locates the text’s economic consciousness in its historical refiguring of the slave trade as imperialist and capitalist, primarily through Henry Blake’s use of the Vulture and the Middle Passage in the second half of the book.  The larger point here, for Doolen, lies in Delany’s use of both the slave ship and the Dismal Swamp to write a revisionist US history that simultaneously acknowledges the American Revolution as unfinished in its quest for “freedom” and the Atlantic slave trade as revealing the commodification of African Americans via racial capitalism. By synthesizing the historical work done in the Dismal Swamp and on the Vulture, Andy does what I have never been able to do in my own reading of this novel: namely, make a clear sense of how the very different revolutionary visions in the first and second half are related.  Yet while I agree that the book seeks to criticize the capitalist mode of the slave trade by taking the narrative to Cuba, one’s access to capital also finds a strange ally in Henry Blake’s planned US slave rebellion.

In order for the financial prospects of emancipation and revolution in Cuba to land fully on the reader, Delany figures personal capital as crucial to a successful slave fugitive, saying to Andy and Charles: “they must have money, if they want to be free.  Money will obtain them everything necessary by which to obtain their liberty.  Money is within all their reach if they only knew it was right to take it” and “it is your certain passport through the white gap, as I term it” (43).  Henry later repeatedly underscores the power of the gold coin in bribing river ferryman on his way to Canada, Delany’s narrator stressing the golden eagle as the very embodiment of freedom.  In this context, the freedom must be stolen (or perhaps redistributed) from masters as a matter of right, but Delany’s notion of right does not stem from a Lockean sense of natural right, but from the legal framework of the nation state, particularly US fugitive slave laws as necessitating the various bribes that occur as Blake’s group journeys north from Mississippi.

The emancipatory power of capital becomes legally sanctioned in Cuba with the combination of legal knowledge and personal capital that allows Maggie/Lotty to go free under Spanish Cuban slaveholding laws: “This law gives the slave the right, whenever desirous to leave his master, to make him a tender in Spanish coin, which if he don’t accept, on proof of the tender the slave may apply to the parish priest or bishop of the district, who has the right immediately to declare such a slave free” (183).  The Spanish coin, here, can be seen as a symbolic foil to the US gold eagle coin, one of them given as a bribe to border watchmen operating outside of the law, the other legally and religiously sanctioned.  It seems that in Blake, Delany offers a legal vision where capital can play an emancipatory role under the law, but this vision can only come to fruition outside of any US, given the segregationist laws brought about in Cuba largely resulting from the political efforts of white US Southerners, as opposed to the Spanish law allowing an individual to gain manumission in the same manner as Maggie.  Without US influence in Cuba (or an imagined national elsewhere), African Americans following Delany’s vision could transition from the status of commodity, the object bought and sold through gold currency, to individuals given the right to use capital for their own purposes, whatever they may be: to own rather than be owned.

Go Vols! State Military Volunteerism and _Magdalena, The Beautiful Mexican Maid_

As I sit here unavailingly wearing my Tennessee Volunteer orange game day shirt—An ESPN headline today reads “Auburn whips Tennessee”—I am reflecting on an aspect of Buntline’s novel that informs its status as an example of what Robert Johannsen calls “war-literature.”  While Magdalena, The Beautiful Mexican Maid seems to offer a complicated approach to glorifying the violence of the US-Mexican War, I was struck by the narrator’s preoccupation with the identity of state-based regiments, particularly during the battle sequence at Buena Vista in Chapter 17: “the volunteer regiments to his right and left, the mounted men of Arkansas and Kentucky close at the mountain’s base” (91); “supported by the Indiana regiment on foot” (92); “The enemy, now cheered by its success, poured down in full force upon the Mississippi and Illinois regiments” (93); “”Oh, my brave Mississippians!’ cried the excited Taylor” (93); “tell him that with his squadron, Bucker’s company, and Pike’s Arkansas boys, he must ‘head off’ those lancers!” (93); “close upon his left was Vaughn of Kentucky” (94); “more to the left, where, also, Marshall’s Kentucky and Yell’s Arkansas calvary had prepared to meet them” (94).  The Mexican army, while outnumbering Taylor’s forces 4:1, not only faces individuals on the field of battle, they must face soldiers whose identity is emblemized by the force of the republican system of statehood.

By focusing so strongly on state-based war volunteerism at the Buena Vista battle (and subsequently in reflections of Palo Alto elsewhere in the text), Buntline further affirms the status of American Republicanism contrasted with Mexico’s “stifling oppression of state and church” (Johannsen 189).  In The Halls of the Montezumas, Robert Johannsen accounts for the attention to volunteerism paid by writers of Mexican war-literature, particularly Buntline, as a device of formulaic, popular sensational fiction: “[These novels] were passive reflectors of notions and attitudes that were current, popular and salable, rather than innovators or leaders.  Their portrayal of the war reinforced the way many Americans saw, or wanted to see, the conflict.”  The volunteer, “superior, good, and patriotic” is contrasted with “the dark, skulking, ‘inferior’ Mexican ranchero” (189). 

I agree with Johannsen that Buntline’s volunteers (more directly featured in his earlier novel The Volunteer) serve to contrast with the flatly charactered Mexican soldiers (particularly in battle scenes).  However, it seems to me that by underscoring the state-affiliations of these soldiers, Buntline also stood to please and attract a wider audience by mentioning a reader’s home state in the story.  Narratively, this would make a reader more directly identify with the soldiers in battle experientially and root for their state’s “boys,” although I notice my Tennessean forebears are nowhere to be seen (save brief mention of Sam Houston, Tennessee’s seventh governor).  Johannsen eventually concludes that the Mexican War’s role in these mid-century popular novelettes (such as Buntline’s) “simply became an element of their formula, alongside such other topics as the American Revolution, the mysteries of urban life, frontier adventure, piracy on the high seas, and so on” (195-6).  Yet, it seems to me that Buntline’s figuring of specific state volunteers, when considered an experiential device aimed at popular readers strongly identified with their state, echoes more of what Johannsen concludes regarding the role of Charles Wilkins Webber’s war articles in the American review as potentially “foster[ing] a spirit that made the war all the more popular” (186).  In this sense, Buntline’s is truly a “war-literature” published in the midst of the conflict in 1847, ideologically supporting the idea of state-identified citizens fighting to further the US imperial conquest of North America.

Home, Home on the Range; or Can a haunted house ever be a home?

Beginning with the very title itself, the idea of “home” in Lippard’s ‘Bel of Prairie Eden proves complicated by the context of American Imperialism and the US/Mexico War.  If “Eden” were to be considered a home, it is inevitable, following the metaphor, that those within Eden would be expelled from their home as a result of wrongdoing.  If, as Shelley Streeby suggests in the beginning of “George Lippard’s 1948”, the sensationalist writer saw Westward expansion and the settlement of low-income workers on homesteads as a utopian solution to urban inequality, he might have been more hesitant about that notion by the time he wrote ‘Bel of Prairie Eden.  According to Streeby, this ambivalence comes from Lippard employing a “panoply of gothic effects” in his US/Mexico War novels that both “contributes to the demonization of Mexicans and may thereby feed the war frenzy of readers” yet “Force is never plausibly transformed into consent; the violence that structures most of the narrative does not disappear but instead fully implicates the Texas colonizer in the bleak conclusion” (76).  If Mexicans are demonized (along with the “thick lipped” Irish Ewen) and the Texas colonizer perhaps has just as many problems, who do these ghosts running around the prairie actually haunt?  It is unclear who the memory of Cortes haunts more:  the descendants of the Spanish conquistadors, having spent Lippard’s “300 Years” in post-Montezuma Mexico, or the US settlers, embodying the memory of Cortes in their yearning for prosperity at whatever cost, justified by their own sort of providential Olmedo? 

Why does Cortes the Spaniard haunt the text written by Lippard the Philadelphian?  In “The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest,” Jesse Aleman utilizes Freud’s notion of the uncanny as “unheimlich,” or “the unhomely,” to help account for the haunting of Américan history in US writing about Mexico, saying “the fluidity of national borders collapses the otherwise clear distinctions between native and foreigner, domestic and international, and America and América” (409).  Furthermore, Aleman helps answer the question I pose in the title of this blog by analyzing the further linguistic implications of unheimlich: “Heimlich also means “native,” however, so that the notion of home can be extended to the idea of nation” (409).  As with Prescott and Bird, Lippard’s text is haunted by the buried history of the Spanish conquest of Mexico, unearthed in the actions of the fledgling US entering the game of imperialism, as Streeby and Aleman remind us, long before 1898.  Perhaps instead of a home in the West, an undisturbed Prairie Eden, the US moved into an old house that had already had many tenants who had kicked out the previous owner for time immemorial. Surely, millions of Americans today consider the land in contention between the US and Mexico in the mid-19^th Century as “home,” but when one is tasked in constructing a narrative that celebrates the establishment of that home, one likely finds themselves, well, haunted by a past they did not enact but are left to reckon with nonetheless.  As Aleman writes, “one Cortes is the same as the other in the hemisphere’s haunting history of conquest” (423).