All Astir

I begin this "All Astir" with the sad news of the passing of P. Sterling Stuckey on August 15, 2018, at the age of 86, and of the passing of John B. (Jack) Putnam on September 9, 2018, at the age of 82. Both figures had a lasting impact on my life. As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, I took a course with Professor Stuckey and remember being blown away by his discussion of "Benito Cereno." Later, I met Jack Putnam in the persona of Herman Melville at an event honoring the sesquicentennial of Melville's 1841 departure from Fairhaven, Mass., when he quoted all of "Loomings" by heart.

Carolyn L. Karcher, author of Shadow Over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America (1980), writes:

Melville scholars owe an incalculable debt to Sterling Stuckey for reorienting our field by illuminating the African influences on Melville's art and demonstrating Melville's familiarity with African culture, acquired both through wide reading of travel accounts and through direct exposure to African American music and dance while growing up in New York and Albany and interacting with his fellow sailors. Although earlier scholars had focused on Melville's engagement with the controversy over slavery and race, it was Sterling who, in "The Death of Benito Cereno" and later in "The Tambourine in Glory" and a wealth of other essays, turned our attention to African culture and prompted us to begin examining Melville's oeuvre from an Afrocentric perspective.

I first met Sterling in December 1984, when we both spoke on an MLA panel organized by Barbara Foley. We immediately recognized each other as intellectual kin and started exchanging work in progress and seeking opportunities to discuss our scholarly projects in person. One of these opportunities arose at a forum in Paris organized by the late Viola Sachs, where Sterling, his lovely wife Harriette, and I spent a lot of time together. Sterling had clearly influenced French Melvilleans as deeply as he had us Americans, and it was fascinating to observe them applying his insights as they reinterpreted texts they had been studying for years.

Sterling's scholarship also helped spark a major conference in New Bedford on Melville and Frederick Douglass at which he gave the keynote. Titled "Cheer and Gloom: Douglass and Melville on Slave Dance and Music," it appears in the volume of essays that grew out of the conference, edited by Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter.

As important as it is to Melvilleans, Sterling's scholarship extended far beyond our domain. His monumental works The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (1972), Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987), and Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History (1994) made him one of the most distinguished American historians of his time. Testifying to the full scope of his achievements, "A Celebration of the Life and Legacy of P. Sterling Stuckey" was held by the University of California, Riverside, in honor of his retirement in 2004. Its subject was "Africans, Culture, and Intellectuals in North America: P. Sterling Stuckey and the Folk." Most of the participants were former students who had won recognition for their own contributions, while others were leading scholars in their fields who paid tribute to his influence on their work. Sterling's ethos—his generosity, his modesty, his warmth, his utter dedication to fostering appreciation of African and African American culture—radiated through the conference and fused us all into a community. That is how I will always remember Sterling.

Robert S. Levine, author of Race, Transnationalism, and Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies (2017), remembers Professor Stuckey's scholarship and his generosity:

In 1995, I phoned Sterling Stuckey to ask him to contribute an essay to The Cambridge Companion to Herman Melville. I did this with some trepidation. After all, he was a distinguished historian in African American studies and I was, well, an English professor. But Sterling was unfailingly gracious on the phone, as he would be unfailingly gracious on email and in person, and he quickly agreed to contribute an essay on African culture...