Prompt

For this assignment, I would like you to write a 1200-word essay with a thesis that makes a claim about the depiction of race in Benito Cereno. 

Scholars have long concerned themselves with this novella’s representation of the problem of racial slavery. H. Bruce Franklin, for example, argues that Melville creates a character in Amassa Delano who, like the founding fathers, “fails to see the disparity between his ‘republican impartiality’ and his racist, hierarchical behavior.” Similarly, Caroline Karcher writes that Benito Cereno is a response to the “menacing gains racism was making” in the name of what constituted science and genealogy during the 1800s.  C.L.R. James is even more expansive when he writes that in the story Melville, “itemized every single belief cherished by an advanced civilization […] about a backward people and then one by one showed that they were not merely false but were the direct cause of [Captain Delano’s] own blindness and stupidity.” 

I’m interested to know what you think. Does the novella give us an antiracist representation of enslavement that opposes the slave trade? Or does it paint enslaved Africans in a negative light? What about whiteness? Are we on Amassa Delano’s side or should we be suspicious of his assumptions about what he perceives while on board the San Dominick? 

Format:

Typed, double-spaced, 1200 words

Due:

11/29 by midnight

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