Race and Vision in the Nineteenth-Century United States ed. by Shirley Samuels (review)

In Moby-Dick, as I have previously argued, Melville re-orients the Gothic, an artistic form often understood as fraught with repressed traumatic histories, as a future-facing mode that represents Ahab's whaleboat crew as Malay-coded figures beyond the pale of an emergent liberal cosmopolitanism. In this paper, I revisit the novel's final image of Malay-coded horror—Fedallah's body, bound with Manilla rope to that of Moby Dick—as a potent prism through which to re-engage Melville as a critic of imperialist ecocide. Drawing on Donna Haraway's recent formulations of the "Chthulucene" and "tentacular thinking" as concepts for re-conceiving the eco-traumas of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Plantationocene, I question whether and how Melville's spectacular fusion of animals in Moby-Dick, whose gothic aesthetics derive intelligibility from imperialist and capitalist regimes of power, might be productively de-gothicized toward ecocritical ends. Additionally, I theorize that the novel's shifting aesthetics of entanglement, which move from an embrace of relationality (cf. Ishmael and Queequeg's attachment by monkey-rope) to an increasingly gothicized precarity ("all men live enveloped in whale-lines") might be productively re-raveled. If we recognize, with Haraway, how often "a dark bewitched commitment to the lure of Progress (and its polar opposite) lashes us to endless infernal alternatives" and binds us to paralyzing forms of climate despair or cruel optimism, I submit that Moby-Dick affords continued opportunities for speculative figurations of multispecies entanglement that challenge us to subvert inequitable aestheticizations rooted in Kantian "subjective universality" and reclaim sublime experience for alternative modes of intersubjective apprehension.