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Babo's “Mute”-ny: Deaf Culture and Black Testimony in Antebellum America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2024

Sari Altschuler
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Abstract

Readers of Benito Cereno, Melville's only story about slavery, have long debated whether the Black mutineers aboard the San Dominick are, as the narrator suggests, “voiceless.” This essay begins with the self-fashioned muteness of the rebellion's leaders to offer a new linguistic genealogy of the novella, unpacking how Melville uses the cultural and legal structures of muteness to reframe Black communication. The category mute organizes the story's description, characterization, dialogue, and mode and structures the conditions of possibility for Black testimony. Such lessons were, the story's publication context reveals, more available to Melville's original readers. In showing how cultural and legal structures associated with disability served as resources for Black rights, this essay reveals how structurally intersectional analysis can resurface central aspects of a text. The cultural and legal history of Deaf culture make sites of Black communication and the possibility of Black testimony in Melville's novella legible once more.

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 138 , Issue 5 , October 2023 , pp. 1149 - 1164
Copyright
Copyright © 2023 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Modern Language Association of America

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Hester Blum, Hunt Howell, Paul Kelleher, Ross Knecht, Chris Parsons, Zach Samalin, and Jesse Schwartz for their generous feedback on earlier drafts of this essay, as well as audiences at C19, Oxford University, Université de Lille, Bowdoin College, and Washington University in St. Louis for their sharp engagement. I owe a special debt to Eve Zimmerman and the Wellesley Newhouse Center for the Humanities for the fellowship that made this essay possible.

References

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