Do subjective ideas of liberty inevitably entail that liberators marginalize others? Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno and Greg Grandin’s historical analysis Empire of Necessity illustrate the cases of the Tryal, a Spanish slave ship which Melville fictitiously calls the San Dominick, and the Perseverance, fictively known as the Bachelor’s Delight in Benito Cereno to pose this question. At the turn of the 18th century, on tightly packed commercial ships, passengers experienced patriarchal control in different manners. Captain Benito Cereno relinquished his liberty to control his subordinates after realizing that Spanish colonial authority grew increasingly obsolete through military defeats and uprisings. As an authority figure unable
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Specifically, Cereno’s loss of power echoes the standoff between multitudinous Haitian revolutionaries and Spanish forces in Saint-Domingue in 1793. After Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture marched 10,000 black troops into the Spanish side of the island, the crown sent letters to Toussaint to “treat soldiers with dignity,” frightened that it could no longer control an overwhelming number of black soldiers under an enemy flag. Back on the San Dominick, intimidated by a greater number of black slaves who sought liberation from Spanish control, Cereno dejectedly surrendered his direction of the ship to the slaves. Fearfully, as Grandin explicates, Cereno allowed Babo to reproduce patriarchy through the reversal of power dynamics as Babo “gently tend[ed to Cereno], dressing him, wiping spittle from his mouth, and nestling him in his black arms when he seems to faint.” Given that black Haitian revolutionaries in search of liberty wore down the Spanish supervision of the New World, anti-European bodies demolished what remained of Cereno’s patriarchal …show more content…
Arguably, the “shadowy tableau” of “droning and drooling” enslaved bagpipe players readied Babo’s slave army for the attempted mutiny and murder of Cereno later on. Because the mediums of communication were incomprehensible to the white men, the white men did not recognize the collective intelligence of the slaves. By the same token, one may question whether the slaves endeavored to quash white culture and superimpose their African beliefs and norms to reverse patriarchy. Perhaps, since “‘evil’ had ‘originally been done to [Babo and all other slaves who experienced captivity],” the slaves intended the mutiny to counter white patriarchy by exacting painful domination and instilling fear very rapidly upon Cereno and Delano. In this respect, slaves may have appropriated white behaviors to violently subjugate their white male ship masters and thus reproduced patriarchy to spite
Specifically, Cereno’s loss of power echoes the standoff between multitudinous Haitian revolutionaries and Spanish forces in Saint-Domingue in 1793. After Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture marched 10,000 black troops into the Spanish side of the island, the crown sent letters to Toussaint to “treat soldiers with dignity,” frightened that it could no longer control an overwhelming number of black soldiers under an enemy flag. Back on the San Dominick, intimidated by a greater number of black slaves who sought liberation from Spanish control, Cereno dejectedly surrendered his direction of the ship to the slaves. Fearfully, as Grandin explicates, Cereno allowed Babo to reproduce patriarchy through the reversal of power dynamics as Babo “gently tend[ed to Cereno], dressing him, wiping spittle from his mouth, and nestling him in his black arms when he seems to faint.” Given that black Haitian revolutionaries in search of liberty wore down the Spanish supervision of the New World, anti-European bodies demolished what remained of Cereno’s patriarchal …show more content…
Arguably, the “shadowy tableau” of “droning and drooling” enslaved bagpipe players readied Babo’s slave army for the attempted mutiny and murder of Cereno later on. Because the mediums of communication were incomprehensible to the white men, the white men did not recognize the collective intelligence of the slaves. By the same token, one may question whether the slaves endeavored to quash white culture and superimpose their African beliefs and norms to reverse patriarchy. Perhaps, since “‘evil’ had ‘originally been done to [Babo and all other slaves who experienced captivity],” the slaves intended the mutiny to counter white patriarchy by exacting painful domination and instilling fear very rapidly upon Cereno and Delano. In this respect, slaves may have appropriated white behaviors to violently subjugate their white male ship masters and thus reproduced patriarchy to spite