Rituals of race: Mount, Melville, and antebellum America
Abstract
The premise of this dissertation is the view that race is a culturally constructed phenomenon, by now a well-established idea in the scholarly world. Dominant forces in American culture depend upon studiously maintained stereotypes about race in order to maintain their dominance and to minimize any tension that threatens the status quo. The specific inquiry of this project is how American culture in the nineteenth century reacted when clear evidence to the contrary erupted into the public consciousness. What are the mechanisms of these responses, whom do they serve, and what are the actual results? This study depends on anthropologist Victor Turner, whose work on “social dramas” and on the rituals that are the cultural response to them provides an effective entry into how Americans in the antebellum years responded to threats to their untenable value systems of race and power. Because the political and legal state of African Americans was the cause of so many painful social dramas, blackness—a performed set of traits and gestures that was available across racial lines—became a flexible signifier that allowed a variety of figures, including the genre painter William Sidney Mount, to use blackness as a tool for change—though not necessarily a positive change for blacks themselves. Mount used the fictionality of race and its rituals to create what was seen as a new, particularly “American” art, with himself at the forefront, and, later, to challenge the racial orthodoxy. Herman Melville, however, saw such rituals of race and the uncertainty of race that attended them as less inevitably positive processes, and, in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno, he addressed how such rituals left both blacks and whites socially adrift and physically endangered by the implications of the racial fictions the rituals often protected.
Degree
Ph.D.
Advisors
Lamb, Purdue University.
Subject Area
American studies|American literature|Art history
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