Kirjahaku

Here is that rare work that in research and interpretation is original almost from beginning to end. For the first time we discover that slave music and dance are used by Melville in Moby-Dick in the creation of some of his most tragic and avant-garde art. Just as previously unknown African practices, found in travel accounts, reveal a powerful symbolic link between Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick, Frederick Douglass's formulation of joy-sorrow in slave life and music leads to the discovery of a blues aesthetic in Moby-Dick that is full of implications for American culture and the craft of writing. In the future, neither Benito Cereno nor Moby-Dick, should be read as before, for important passages in each spring from Melville's magnificent treatment of a source common to each. In still more ways, Melville in this volume in not the Melville we have known. Especially in Benito Cereno, the creation of principal characters, symbols, and scenes is drawn from sources hidden in obscurity for roughly a century and a half. Though African influences predominate, Latin American, European, and North American influences are also woven masterfully into the design of the novella. As emphases among them shift back and forth, Melville's art, stunning in its range and subtlety, shimmers with previously undisclosed brilliance. Targeting how he conceived and executed his art, we find in this volume a degree of heretofore unprobed intertexuality in his own work and reveal the other volumes that informed his creative process.

Although Herman Melville's masterworks Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno have long been the subject of vigorous scholarly examination, the impact of African culture on these works has received surprisingly little critical attention. Presenting a groundbreaking reappraisal of these two powerful pieces of fiction, Sterling Stuckey reveals how African customs and rituals heavily influenced one of America's greatest novelists. The Melville that emerges in this innovative, intertextual study is one profoundly shaped by the vibrant African-influenced music and dance culture of nineteenth-century America. Drawing on extensive research, Stuckey reveals how celebrations of African culture by black Americans, such as the Pinkster festival and the Ring Shout dance form, permeated Melville's environs during his formative years and found their way into his finest fiction. Also demonstrated is the extent to which the author of Moby-Dick is indebted to Frederick Douglass's depiction of music, especially the blues, in his classic slave narrative. Connections between Melville's work and African culture are also extended beyond America to the African continent itself. With readings of hitherto unexplored chapters in Delano's Voyages and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres and other nonfiction sources--such as Joseph Dupuis's Journal of a Residence in Ashantee --Stuckey links Benito Cereno and Moby-Dick , pinpointing the sources from which Melville drew to fashion major characters that appear aboard both the Pequod and the San Dominick . Combining inventive literary and historical analysis, Stuckey shows how myriad aspects of African culture coalesced to create the unique vision conveyed in Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno. Ultimately, African Culture and Melville's Art provides a wealth of insight into the novelist's expressive power and the development of his distinct cross-cultural aesthetic.

Twenty-five years after its original publication, Oxford has released a new edition of Sterling Stuckey's ground-breaking study, Slave Culture. A leading cultural historian and authority on slavery, Stuckey explains how different African peoples interacted on the plantations of the South to achieve a common culture. He argues that at the time of emancipation, slaves still remained essentially African in culture, a conclusion that has had profound implications for theories of black liberation and race relations in America. Drawing evidence from the anthropology and art history of Central and West African cultural traditions and exploring the folklore of the American slave, Stuckey reveals an intrinsic Pan-African impulse that contributed to the formation of the black ethos in slavery. He presents fascinating profiles of such nineteenth-century figures as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and Frederick Douglass, as well as detailed examinations into the lives and careers of W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson in this century. The second edition, which includes a Foreword by historian John Stauffer, will reintroduce Stuckey's masterpiece to a wider audience. Stukey provides a new introduction that looks at the life of the book and the impact it has had on the field of African-American scholarship, as well as how the field has changed in the 25 years since its original publication.