Introduction
1: The Tambourine in Glory
2: Benito Cereno and Moby Dick
3: The Hatchet-Polishers, Benito Cereno, and Amasa Delano
4: Cheer and Gloom: Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville on Slave
Music and Dance
Appendix: Chapter XVI from Captain Amasa Delano's A Narrative of
Voyages and Travels
Sterling Stuckey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History at University Of California, Riverside. He is the author of the groundbreaking studies Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America and Going through the Storm: The Influence of African American Art in History, both published by Oxford University Press.
"Revisiting Melville's New York and Albany neighborhoods, Sterling
Stuckey has given us a stunning reconstruction of the genesis of
Moby-Dick and Benito Cereno. His Melville is an 'Africanist' in the
best sense: in frequent contact with Ashantee culture, and inspired
by the music and dance of the slaves to forge his own poetics of
cheer and gloom." --Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University
"In African Culture and Melville's Art, Sterling Stuckey brings his
extraordinary talents as a historian and critic to bear on Herman
Melville, and in the process he gives us brilliant and original
readings of Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Melville's world. It is a
stunning achievement and should be required reading for anyone
interested in American culture."-John Stauffer, Harvard
University
"Studying Melville's artful treatment of Douglass, Dupuis, Delano,
and Bowditch,
Professor Stuckey expands and deepens our knowledge of Melville's
creative employment of African culture in Benito Cereno and
Moby-Dick. Stuckey's book is full of discoveries along freshly
mapped paths that invite our further investigation." --Frederick
Bernard, Aquinas College
"Our greatest scholar of African American culture finds a kindred
spirit in our greatest nineteenth-century novelist. If you want to
know how African the roots of American culture are, from the blues
to Melville, this marvelous, adventuresome and elegant book is for
you." --David R. Roediger, University of Illinois,
Urbana-Champaign
"With the eloquence of a poet and the erudition of a scholar,
historian Sterling Stuckey employs cross-disciplinary methods in
this brilliant analysis of the African sources and intertextual
resonances in Herman Melville's oeuvre. This definitive study
deepens our understanding of the writer's creative genius." -
-Miriam DeCosta-Willis, University of Maryland, Baltimore
County
"Alone among major white American writers of the nineteenth
century, Melville deployed creatively, sensitively, and without the
then fashionable cultural condescension, a compelling black
presence at the heart of some of his most morally challenging and
important fiction. By skillfully and persuasively tracking the
cultural sources available to the novelist by way of informing and
fleshing out that inspiration, Stuckey deepens, enriches, and
enlarges our
understanding and appreciation of Melville's accomplishments."
--Ekwueme Michael Thelwell, University of Massachusetts,
Amherst
"Stuckey's African Culture and Melville's Art presents new and
welcomed perspectives for Melville studies. His biographical,
cultural, and intertextual analyses uncover interesting and
relevant information. Ultimately, Stuckey sheds some light on the
shrouded and compelling craft of one of America's finest writers."
--Suite101.com
"[A] considerable achievement...In his attention especially to race
and social history, to the global contexts for American authorship,
and the interplay of American exceptionalism and transnationalism,
Stuckey contributes significantly to an ongoing amplification of
the boundaries of Melville criticism and of American literary
studies generally." --College Literature
"Stuckey concludes with a brilliant elucidation of the blues and
spirituals in which he makes connections to Hegel and Frederick
Douglass. The importance of this book extends beyond Melville
studies to any field in which race matters. Essential."
--Choice
"Stuckey's American Culture and Melville's Art is a very important
contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship because it
establishes major connections between African culture and
Melville's Redburn: His First Voyage, Moby-Dick, and Benito
Cereno...By considering these writings as vital historical and
anthropological sources, Stuckey suggests the important role that
interdisciplinary scholarships can have in the study of the
relations between Africa and its parental cultures in the United
States." --Southwest Journal of Cultures
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