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Interchange – Babo In the Sunshine: Herman Melville and the Tryal Rebellion
Last week’s show with Zach Sell was about how US Slavery troubled the imperial imaginary, asking if US plantation overseers could translate the brutal practices of slavery’s violent efficiencies onto Britain’s colonial empire in India and the West Indies in the mid-19th century.
Next week’s show with Mark Driscoll again centers on Imperial Britain and the ecological disaster of capitalism inscribed onto the land via narco- and human trafficking in China and Japan in the 19th century as all of nature is reduced to material resource through warfare, lawfare and rawfare.
To travel from India to China we’ll board the seal-hunting ship the Bachelor’s Delight, captained by Amasa Delano of Duxbury, Massachusetts. En route we’ll encounter a distressed ship in calmed waters, the Spanish “slaver” the San Dominick, captained by Benito Cereno.
Which is to say, today we revisit the great novella of Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” serialized in 1855 in Putnam’s Magazine. Written with the US Civil War on the horizon, Melville cast a backwards stare into the bright light of the Haitian Revolution, turning The Tryal Rebellion of 1805, a shipboard slave uprising in the South Pacific off the coast of Chile, into a staged drama exposing the so-called master race as ignorant and deluded by an optimism born of unrestrained violence.
The Haitian Revolution extended from 1791 to 1804 when Haiti won its independence from France. Melville sets his shipboard revolution in 1799 clearly intending his US readers be reminded of that world-historical event.
For today’s show two previous conversations about the novella have been combined: one with Jonathan Elmer from the 2013 first episode of WFHB's The Custom House, called "Babo's Razor"; and one with Maisha Wester and Christopher Freeburg, from the 2015 Interchange episode, "Shadows Are Black." And at one point we’ll hear a bit of an audio production of the story by WFHB’s Books Unbound program.
Our music today comes from Charles Mingus who I consider the Melville of Jazz, an ever unfolding artist of oceanic genius - this is the title track from the 1961 Tonight at Noon - which might be interpreted as “darkness visible.”
GUESTS
Maisha Wester, author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places; Christopher Freeburg, author of Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century America; and Jonathan Elmer, author of Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World.
RELATED
Babo's Razor (Episode 1 of The Custom House)
Shadows Are Black: Slavery's Long Setting (Interchange)
Confronting Black Jacobins (on the Haitian Revolution, with Gerald Horne)
The Legacy of C.L.R. James (Interchange)
MUSIC - Charles Mingus
"Tonight at Noon" (Tonight at Noon)
"Prayer for Passive Resistance" (Pre-Bird)
"Eclipse" (Pre-Bird)
"Weird Nightmare" (Pre-Bird)
"Things Ain’t What They Used to Be" (Mingus Dynasty)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
View all episodes
By WFHBLast week’s show with Zach Sell was about how US Slavery troubled the imperial imaginary, asking if US plantation overseers could translate the brutal practices of slavery’s violent efficiencies onto Britain’s colonial empire in India and the West Indies in the mid-19th century.
Next week’s show with Mark Driscoll again centers on Imperial Britain and the ecological disaster of capitalism inscribed onto the land via narco- and human trafficking in China and Japan in the 19th century as all of nature is reduced to material resource through warfare, lawfare and rawfare.
To travel from India to China we’ll board the seal-hunting ship the Bachelor’s Delight, captained by Amasa Delano of Duxbury, Massachusetts. En route we’ll encounter a distressed ship in calmed waters, the Spanish “slaver” the San Dominick, captained by Benito Cereno.
Which is to say, today we revisit the great novella of Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” serialized in 1855 in Putnam’s Magazine. Written with the US Civil War on the horizon, Melville cast a backwards stare into the bright light of the Haitian Revolution, turning The Tryal Rebellion of 1805, a shipboard slave uprising in the South Pacific off the coast of Chile, into a staged drama exposing the so-called master race as ignorant and deluded by an optimism born of unrestrained violence.
The Haitian Revolution extended from 1791 to 1804 when Haiti won its independence from France. Melville sets his shipboard revolution in 1799 clearly intending his US readers be reminded of that world-historical event.
For today’s show two previous conversations about the novella have been combined: one with Jonathan Elmer from the 2013 first episode of WFHB's The Custom House, called "Babo's Razor"; and one with Maisha Wester and Christopher Freeburg, from the 2015 Interchange episode, "Shadows Are Black." And at one point we’ll hear a bit of an audio production of the story by WFHB’s Books Unbound program.
Our music today comes from Charles Mingus who I consider the Melville of Jazz, an ever unfolding artist of oceanic genius - this is the title track from the 1961 Tonight at Noon - which might be interpreted as “darkness visible.”
GUESTS
Maisha Wester, author of African American Gothic: Screams from Shadowed Places; Christopher Freeburg, author of Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth Century America; and Jonathan Elmer, author of Lingering and Being Last: Race and Sovereignty in the New World.
RELATED
Babo's Razor (Episode 1 of The Custom House)
Shadows Are Black: Slavery's Long Setting (Interchange)
Confronting Black Jacobins (on the Haitian Revolution, with Gerald Horne)
The Legacy of C.L.R. James (Interchange)
MUSIC - Charles Mingus
"Tonight at Noon" (Tonight at Noon)
"Prayer for Passive Resistance" (Pre-Bird)
"Eclipse" (Pre-Bird)
"Weird Nightmare" (Pre-Bird)
"Things Ain’t What They Used to Be" (Mingus Dynasty)
CREDITS
Producer & Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young