Although Herman Melville's masterworks Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno have long been the subject of vigorous scholarly examination, the impact of African culture on these works has received surprisingly little critical attention. Presenting a groundbreaking reappraisal of these two powerful pieces of fiction, Sterling Stuckey reveals how African customs and rituals heavily influenced one of America's greatest novelists. The Melville that emerges in this innovative, intertextual study is one profoundly shaped by the vibrant African-influenced music and dance culture of nineteenth-century America. Drawing on extensive research, Stuckey reveals how celebrations of African culture by black Americans, such as the Pinkster festival and the Ring Shout dance form, permeated Melville's environs during his formative years and found their way into his finest fiction. Also demonstrated is the extent to which the author of Moby-Dick is indebted to Frederick Douglass's depiction of music, especially the blues, in his classic slave narrative. Connections between Melville's work and African culture are also extended beyond America to the African continent itself. With readings of hitherto unexplored chapters in Delano's Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and other nonfiction sources--such as Joseph Dupuis's Journal of a Residence in Ashantee --Stuckey links Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick , pinpointing the sources from which Melville drew to fashion major characters that appear aboard both the Pequod and the San Dominick . Combining inventive literary and historical analysis, Stuckey shows how myriad aspects of African culture coalesced to create the unique vision conveyed in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno. Ultimately, African Culture and Melville's Art provides a wealth of insight into the novelist's expressive power and the development of his distinct cross-cultural aesthetic.
The Backgrounds of African Art
Going Through the Storm covers the entire spectrum of African American culture, presenting a new look at the foundations of black culture and the civil right movement within the context of slavery and slave music.
9 It is a strange irony that historians as a group have been the least able to appreciate the African influences in slave culture, so richly detailed by Stuckey in his history and by subsequent scholars in virtually every other ...
Bainard Cowan's 1982 study Exiled Waters: “Moby-Dick” and the Crisis of Allegory also brought questions of knowledge and meaning to the fore. Rather than prophecy, however, Cowan focused on the role of allegory in Melville's writing, ...
Specially commissioned essays provide a critical introduction to one of the most significant writers of nineteenth-century America.
Fromont sheds light on the cross-cultural exchanges between Africa, Europe, and Latin America that shaped the early modern world, and she outlines the religious, artistic, and social background of the countless men and women displaced by ...
This is the first companion to consider Melville in a global context, and to look at the impact of global economies and technologies on the ways people read his works.
Focusing on the theme of warriorhood, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir weaves a complex history of how colonial influence forever changed artistic practice, objects, and their meaning.
Hannah Lauren Murray is Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her recent monograph Liminal Whiteness in Early US Fiction (2021) examines fluid and precarious whiteness from Charles Brockden Brown to Frank J.
He is currently writing a book titled Melville's Forms. eliza richards is Associate Professor in the Department of English and ... Sacred Uncertainty: Religious Difference and the Shape of Melville's Career, Melville's Mirrors: Literary ...