Abstracts ALA 2016—San Francisco Nonhuman Melville

Much of Melville’s writing is deeply concerned with the nonhuman and both its relation and lack of relation to the human. Considering the breadth of recent critical theories loosely grouped together through their concern for the “nonhuman”—animal studies, ecocriticism, new materialism, speculative realism, theories of impersonality, object-oriented-ontology, zoosemiotics—the current moment offers an opportunity to reassess the nonhuman elements in Melville in ways that, in Geoffrey Sanborn’s phrase, “move beyond the standard bottom lines of violence and meaninglessness” (“Melville and the Nonhuman World,” The New Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013]: 13). Through such attention to the meaning and texture of Melville’s nonhuman, the papers on this panel raise new questions within long-standing Melvillean critical concerns about race, nature, and law. What if we took that racially-ramified and meaning-inscribed surface—skin—and considered how Melville attends to its capacities as a feeling, sensing organ (Davoudi)? What can Melville’s argument against the possibility of whale extinction tell us about the embedded assumptions undergirding later preservationist movements (McNeely)? And how might Melville’s portrayal of the nonhuman aspects of legal thinking illustrate how jurisprudence itself could become an aspect of nonhuman nature (Crow)? In the different contexts of race, ecology, and the law, these papers each begin to unpack the rich relation between human and nonhuman in Melville, and, in so doing, demonstrate how Melville’s interest in those entangled relations contributes both new avenues for traditional Melville studies and new perspectives for thinking about the nonhuman in the current critical moment.

Skin as Sensorium in Melville’s Typee
Dalia Davoudi
Indiana University

This talk, influenced by calls from figures such as Karen Barad to move beyond the linguistic turn, works to unravel the fraught tautologies of skin and sign in Melville’s Typee. In addition to its narrator’s suspicion that he may be cannibalized by Polynesian natives, Typee depicts a white man’s anxiety about being forcibly tattooed: a fear that Samuel Otter identifies as a fear of violence, but also of penetration and “engraving.” The familiar racial semiotics inherent in Otter’s reading understand skin as bodily surface and medium, a point of entry for the body to be inscribed. Rather than “reading” skin in Melville as a site of meaning and signification, attending to sensory experiences with skin opens up a new critique of the human and the imagined cohesion of its bodily parts. Paying particular attention to cortextual scenes of smelling, touching, pain, and visual-aesthetic pleasure, this reading locates a particular Melvillian politics that sees the skin as a site of mutual, dynamic immersion (rather than a surface for unilateral penetration), asking for a more complex treatment of race and ideology. Re-thinking the binding of body and sign can contribute to conversations about race and the nonhuman and also to the long critical effort to think through an ambiguity of signification omnipresent in Melville’s oeuvre.

On the Ethics of Nonhuman Extinction: Moby-Dick in the Anthropocene
Michelle C. Neely
Connecticut College

One of the tragic hallmarks of our current environmental predicament is the spectacle of mass extinction; the World Wildlife Fund has estimated that Earth lost 50% of its wildlife in the past 40 years, and scientists the world over argue that this is just the beginning of a major extinction event of our own making. The ethical status of nonhuman animals amidst “the Sixth Great Extinction” is more pressing than ever. Moby-Dick considers the possibility of whale extinction in the context of mid-nineteenth-century economic and national expansion, but handily rejects the possibility. Melville can help us theorize our current crisis in two key respects. First, Melville’s work points to an ethically complex tension between individual nonhuman animals and species of nonhuman animals amidst extinction events, complexities that Melville’s consideration of whale agency brings to the fore. More generally, Melville’s work is a parable of the anthropocene, a site to explore the grounds on which Moby-Dick—and nineteenth-century intellectuals more generally— rejected the possibility of animal extinction...