Dusky comments of silence: language, race and Herman Melville's "Benito Cereno."

Five months after "Benito Cereno," Melville published a short sketch entitled "The 'Gees," a pseudo-ethnological account of the mixed African-Portuguese population of Fogo, one of the Cape Verde islands off the West African coast. As Carolyn Karcher has shown, both "The 'Gees" and "Benito Cereno" were written in response to the "menacing gains" being made by "scientific racism" in the American 1850s (128). With Josiah C. Nott's and George R. Gliddon's Types of Mankind (1854) as its popular paradigm, this particular brand of polygenist anthropology sought to divide the human race into "entirely separate species, endowed with vastly different physical, intellectual, and temperamental characteristics and ranked hierarchically on a biological scale ranging from the lowest type of Negro to the highest type of Caucasian" (Karcher 128). "The 'Gees" presents a clear indication of how language became implicated in this racial taxonomy:

Of all men seamen have strong prejudices, particularly in the matter of race. They are bigots here. . . . In short, by seamen the abbreviation 'Gee was hit upon in pure contumely; the degree of which may be partially inferred from this, that with them the primitive word Portuguee itself is a reproach; so that 'Gee, being a subtle distillation from that word, stands, in point of relative intensity to it, as attar of roses does to rose-water. (347)

At first glance, this passage suggests that the primitivism of the 'Gee is continuous with the linguistic corruption inherent in his name. Melville's sketch suggests that the name "'Gee" has been infiltrated by the same agents of corruption that have turned a human being of implied racial "purity" into a strange and freakish state of racial hybridity. This particular way of thinking, in which supposed linguistic corruption is the counterpart to - or even the direct proof of - innate racial inferiority, echoes the philological assumptions of the racial scientists. It was during the 1850s that the predominantly Christian notion that the affinity between all languages proved the single, common origin of mankind came under severe attack from polygenist thinkers. Doubting that all languages could be related genealogically, both anthropologists and philologists utilized the idea of "innate" linguistic variety to strengthen the claims for a polygenist account of human creation.(5) Instead of proving the spiritual and racial affinity of all men, language became a means to evaluate the relative "sophistication" of foreign cultures. For example, the German philologist Wilhelm yon Humboldt (a profound influence on another key figure of the American "Renaissance," Wait Whit-man) believed in the superiority of "Indo-European" languages because they enabled the heightened mental development of their speakers. The inherently sophisticated structure of these tongues allowed a correspondingly sophisticated development of mental and cultural intelligence. This line of argument was frequently used as one of the justifications for African cultural inferiority. The Africans' distinct linguistic environment, pre-literate and "cursed" with tribal multilingualism, strengthened the racist claims of what Hans Aarsleff has called Eurocentric "linguistic absolutism" (x).