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Reconsideration: teaching in the multiracial classroom: reconsidering Melville's "Benito Cereno."
MELUS, Spring, 1994 by Robert S. Levine
Like many critics of "Benito Cereno," I read Melville's novella as an antislavery narrative that, by presenting us with the limited perceptions of a sea captain in the midst of a slave revolt, attempts to implicate its readers in the racist world view of Delano only to expose the mendacity, immorality, and dangers of that world view. And I'd go one step further to suggest that the novella, through its implicating narrative strategies, possesses transhistorical power as a work of cultural criticism in the way that it challenges us to consider our own implication in dominant modes of cultural power.(2) The text's ability to implicate readers in Delano's blindness and thus to remind us of our own analogous forms of complicitous blindness is what I try to get across in the classroom (in addition to the novella's more explicit antiracist and antislavery themes). But who is "us"? Does such a unified body of readers exist? As I've found myself teaching the novella to an increasingly diverse student population, these large questions have necessarily complicated my teaching, and understanding, of Melville's text.
When I first taught the novella at Stanford University, however, not many "problems" arose in developing my particular reading of "Benito Cereno," at least none that I could see. My students, for the most part economically well off, and all white, were initially fooled by the text (most were unaware that Delano was in the midst of a slave revolt), were then surprised by the revelation of the plot, and then were "educated" by the ironies newly detected in their rereading of the novella. Good students that they were, they readily accepted their instructor's transhistorical reading of the novella, which, in the late 1970s, made the very Palo Alto point that just as Delano was blind to slavery's evil and the blacks's humanity, so these elite white liberals (and students at Stanford were mostly liberal in those days) were blind to the ways in which their happy idyll at Stanford depended upon the existence of the black ghetto in East Palo Alto, conveniently out of sight and mind on the other side of Route 101. It was just the sort of feel-good consciousness-raising about inequality that we all needed before our late afternoon swim or tennis game.
Things became less easy at the University of Maryland. For one, there were now African American students in my classroom; for another, many of my students, particularly the white students, were more ignorant of the history of slavery than my Stanford students; and for another yet, some of my students, white and black, were working-class people who worked twenty to thirty hours a week while taking a full load of courses. What this meant in practical terms was the following: first, given that African American readers had entered into the equation, there was a greater variety of response in the first-time readings of "Benito Cereno" (blacks more than whites were able to detect the slaves's conspiracy early on). Second, given that many of the white students were less subtle readers than my Stanford students, they showed a greater willingness to accept Delano's (and the narrator's) racist views, and thus I faced greater difficulties in convincing students of Melville's ironic, educative, and implicating purposes. Third, because some of the students, black and white, could legitimately claim to be at the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum, I was perhaps irresponsibly self-righteous in trying to teach these students about their implication in the dominant power structure. Let me now be more specific about these various problems, conflating five years of problems into a paragraph--one that will suggest greater disarray than there actually was (I think)--before I describe my efforts to address these problems.
