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Rewriting A Narrative of Voyages & Travels : A Study of Racism in "Benito Cereno"

Throughout his career, Herman Melville has been recognized as a writer to attempt to wrestle with the impending issues of solving the racism and other social corruptions in the 19th century American society. The most remarkable thing we should note on Melville's works is to figure out his rhetorical efforts to rewrite a pre-text such as a historical fact into a polyphonic post-text. We may say that his novel is one of the most dialogical texts in which Melville's attempt at overcoming any monologism is successfully achieved. This essay will focus on the author's rhetorical strategy of rewriting Amasa Delano's A Narrative of Voyages and Travels (1817) into his novel, Beneto Cereno.(1855) In analyzing his novel with aesthetic distance we can find out two white captains, Delano and Don Benito. Optimistic, self-confident, and generous, Delano represents an Americanness which differentiates from the Old World suffering from the failures of hegemony. He also reflects the 19th American Ideology that their Manifest Destiny is to indulge in Expansionism, which is penetrated deeply in the individual consciousness. The Spanish captain, Don Benito's racial prejudice also results in economic exploitation and oppression to the black people. The mutiny leader, Babo, and other black slaves on the ship resist but only to fail against the unjust social structure. As a symbol of conflicts in human life, the law, instead of realizing justice, doesn't give any fair judgment, only to contribute to the expansion of white's ideology. Melville's experiments with narrative forms and rhetorical interests in social and political range reveal a firm challenge to the rigid ideology, and thereby enable a radical perspective. Melville's text which stresses the process of signification by itself undermines the repressive enforcement of dominant social system. The deconstruction of its meaning seems to deny the closure of the restricted text, and to speak of the truth beyond non-human social system.