ABSTRACT

This essay considers how contemporary debates about the role of African Americans in cultural memories about emancipation are unconsciously rooted in how the field of American studies has taught antebellum cultural production. The essay argues that the operant teaching canon of resistance to enslavement has long privileged white benevolence and diasporic African failure, and thus distorted the widespread and tangible place of successful resistance in the antebellum American imagination. By grappling with the ways in which Melville’s text has long been deployed in American classrooms as a singularity, the essay moves to consider how reframing and rescaling ‘Benito Cereno’ as part of a much larger constellation of textual objects about resistance to enslavement might help shift the course of contemporary understandings about the complexities of the American past.

摘要

本文考虑了当代关于非裔美国人在解放的文化记忆中的作用的辩论如何在不知不觉中植根于美国研究领域如何教授战前文化生产。这篇文章认为，反奴役的操作性教学经典长期以来一直将白人仁慈和散居海外的非洲失败置于特权地位，从而扭曲了在战前美国想象中成功反抗的广泛而切实的地位。通过努力解决长期以来将梅尔维尔的文本作为奇点部署在美国教室中的方式，