The Taste of Class

Abstracts MLA 2011 | Los Angeles, California Melville and the Syntax of Class Chair: Ivy G. Wilson, Northwestern University I n settings as various as whaling ships and Wall Street offices, pastoral meadows and English leisure clubs, Melville’s writings are preoccupied with class formations and with contradictions of decadence and poverty, excess and paucity. While much of the criticism on Melville and class has approached the topic through psychoanalysis to limn readings about his own personal anxieties in works such as Pierre or “Bartleby,” this panel sought to underscore what a historical materialist approach to Melville’s work can reveal about his social world. Glenn Hendler argued that, in “The House-Top,” Melville forced a recognition of the ways in which the white participants of the New York Draft Riots coalesced as a contingent but nonetheless specific class formation. Calling for a more sustained critical engagement with Melville’s transnationalism and tracing his early use of the word “cholo,” Rodrigo Lazo showed how Melville invoked South America and the South American to make class distinctions legible to his readers. Kyla Tompkins analyzed Melville’s preoccupation with taste in “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” as a metaphor for the organization of social differentiation and inequity. Feeling Like a State Glenn Hendler Fordham University M elville’s “The House-Top,” a lyric poem about the 1863 New York City Draft Riots published in Battle-Pieces, remains exceptional not simply as an example of Melville’s genius for compressing the epichistorical into the space of a lyric but also for how it compels the reader to come to terms with the effects and affects of the war’s various permutations. Acknowledging Melville’s engagement with affect, we become aware that the c  2011 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 124 L E V I A T H A N A J O U R N A L O F M E L V I L L E S T U D I E S A B S T R A C T S poem—and perhaps Battle-Pieces in general—is as much about moods and feelings as it is about battles and laws. Melville notes how the mostly Irish mob is simulteneously depicted and not depicted, and he takes on the relationship between the state and a population resistant to the state’s effort to enumerate and thus control it. In Melville’s portrayal, the riots act as a scene of subjection whereby black bodies become the sites upon which a contingent mob can align itself underneath the rubric of the white working class. Dons and Cholos: Intersections of Class In Melville’s South America Rodrigo Lazo University of California, Irvine A curious change takes place in the eighth sketch of The Encantadas, or Enchanted Isles. After telling us that “chola” is another word for “half breed” and describing Felipe as being “of pure Castillian blood,” the narrator brings together Hunilla and Felipe with the Indian Truxill under the designation of “cholos.” What appears to be a slippage of language is actually a nuanced reference to the intersections of racial designation and class formation in South America. Felipe becomes a cholo by association rather than being a cholo because of his racial background. This scene exemplifies the way Melville’s narrators are attuned to how notions of class in South American contexts are affected by language used to demarcate race and social position. I draw on theories of intersectionality—how race, class, gender and other factors combine to influence social stratification—to argue that Melville’s narrators open up an important question for considering his work in global contexts: how does the term “class” change as a result of historically specific conditions outside the United States? Through his travels and reading, Melville picked up enough information to be able to write about South American characters with expert irony. He offers a sardonic view of the world of cholos and dons, and his narrators are often simultaneously derisive of the attitudes and critical of the social structures that sustained certain hierarchies. In addition to the cholos on Norfolk Isle in The Encantadas, we see this across Melville’s...