Transnational Melville

Transnational Melville AMY KAPLAN University of Pennsylvania I start with a quotation from Herman Melville’s White-Jacket: or the World in a Man-of-War (1850): “we expatriate ourselves to nationalize with the universe.”1 So proclaims the eponymous hero in a paean to the roving life of working sailors as he contemplates the stars from the masthead. This sentence put me in mind of the transnational turn in American studies and other disciplines today: the desire, especially on the part of U.S. Americanists, to “expatriate” our perspective, to place it beyond the nation as a vantage point in order to seek a broader—perhaps even universal—framework for analysis in time and space. Some of those frameworks include the hemisphere, the continent, the planet, the republic of letters, deep time, the transatlantic, Diaspora, critical internationalism, and globalization. In White Jacket, this rhapsodic moment is brought down to earth with a thud, as the narrator explains, “But when White-Jacket speaks of the rover’s life, he means not life in a man-of-war, which, with its martial formalities and thousand vices, stabs to the heart the soul of all free-and-easy honorable rovers” (NN WJ 77). There is a tension throughout the novel between the universalizing impulse of expatriation and the representation of the world in a man-of-war, a rigidly hierarchical world bound by violent differentiations and exclusions. (To stick to the writing experiment in the novel of focusing on this world alone, the narrator must exclude the world outside the ship when, for example, it docks in Brazil). Although the words “nation” and “nationalize” had different meanings in 1850 than they do today, I take this tension in WhiteJacket as evocative of a critical dilemma today: how to square the sometimes dizzying border-crossing goals of transnational approaches with the past and present realities of the nation state, its martial, political, economic, and social “formalities” and hierarchies. Melville’s work raises this question: If the nation is inadequate both as a framework for producing knowledge and as a mode of C  2010 The Authors Journal compilation C  2010 The Melville Society and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Herman Melville, White-Jacket or The World in a Man-of-War, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1970), 76; hereafter cited as NN WJ. The present text is a revised version of the original oral presentation at the Seventh International Melville Conference on “Melville and the Mediterranean,” delivered on 17 June 2009 at the École Biblique, in East Jerusalem. 42 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 T R A N S N A T I O N A L M E L V I L L E understanding and experiencing social belonging, what other frameworks are available for representing the world and for imagining modes of sociality and collectivity that do not reproduce the violence and social hierarchies of the nation-state? In the quoted passage, White-Jacket imagines his communing with the universe through the language of nationalizing, just as critics have noticed today that our own critical language of the “transnational” reproduces the structures of national power, imperial reaches, and the global systems of capitalism. Today, I would like to rove through Melville’s work to explore how he posed some of these questions at a time when the nation-state was not the dominant unit for the geopolitical organization of the world or for generating knowledge. His work affords us a critical perspective on both the power and the limits of the nation in a world increasingly interconnected by the vectors of trade, empire, and revolution. I will consider three problems: the transnational circulation of knowledge, the retrospective construction of national histories, and representing and imagining non-national modes of collectivity. Let me start with Moby-Dick and the circulation of knowledge and language outside, across, and beneath national idioms. Melville is interested not only in travel as a way...