6 - “An Anacharsis Clootz Deputation”: Race, Ethnicity, Empire, and Cosmopolitanism

Summary

Melville Belongs to the World. If this seems like a potentially controversial statement regarding a figure who so often has been examined within the context of American nationalism, it is not because of any lack of transnationalism in Melville’s own works. Melville began his career with representations of travel at the crossroads of European and Euro-American imperialism and indigenous cultures in the South Pacific. His first two books not focused on the islands of the South Pacific, Redburn and White-Jacket, both dealt with the cosmopolitan world of the sea, with characters appearing from all over Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa; and in Redburn specifically, Melville celebrated America’s own cosmopolitan makeup. Moby-Dick made Melville’s global concerns explicit, with its famous description of the crew of the Pequod as an “Anacharsis Clootz deputation, from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth” (121). Anacharsis Clootz was an eccentric Prussian nobleman who brought what he believed to be a representative sampling of the human race before the French National Constituent Assembly in 1790, so this reference connects Melville’s work to the ideal of international human fraternity. The sketches in The Encantadas deal with Latin America, as do substantial frame stories within Moby-Dick. Melville’s late long poem Clarel features pilgrims in the Near East from throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas, and late works like John Marr, Sailor and Billy Budd are defined by the internationalism of the sea. And throughout Melville’s body of work he draws on an astonishingly cosmopolitan array of allusions and references.

If Americanists old and new have found varieties of Americanness both reflected and critiqued in Melville’s work, both they and critics from around the planet have found that Melville has at least as much to say about the world at large. Indeed, Melville’s works are among the most resolutely international in American literature. When critics began to make this aspect of Melville’s work a central component of Melville criticism in the 1980s and 1990s, they drew readers’ attention to a strand in Melville’s work that seemed overwhelmingly evident once it was acknowledged. Likewise, Melville’s concern with questions of race and slavery only really began to receive the attention it deserved in the 1970s, but once readers began to look closely, it became evident that questions of race and slavery were to be found everywhere in Melville’s work.