Allied América: The Conspiracies of Benito Cereno and Bolívar in Haiti

Evelyn Soto, University of Pennsylvania, "Allied América: The Conspiracies of Benito Cereno and Bolívar in Haiti"After a year of exile in Kingston, Jamaica, and of fruitless attempts to enlist British and U.S. support for... [ view full abstract ]

Evelyn Soto, University of Pennsylvania, "Allied América: The Conspiracies of Benito Cereno and Bolívar in Haiti"

After a year of exile in Kingston, Jamaica, and of fruitless attempts to enlist British and U.S. support for the independence of Spanish America, Simón Bolívar forged an informal alliance with the first president of the Republic of Haiti, Alexandre Pétion. In light of this understudied collaboration that began in 1815, and which I examine through Bolívar and Pétion’s roughly year-long epistolary correspondence, this paper reads anew Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855). In particular, I orient our attention to Delano’s fleeting suspicions aboard the San Dominick about a joint Spanish - black conspiracy. Delano's hesitant question, "Could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks?" quickly becomes overwritten with a second question, "Who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?" Critics have often read the novella as an allegory of, on the one hand, U.S. triumphalism after the Mexican - American war coincident with its publication date, and on the other, of the Haitian Revolution’s threat to US racial governmentality and slaveholding interests. I bring the epistles of this South - South alliance together with Benito Cereno to offer a counter-archive for the first interpretation and to expand the hemispheric analysis of the second. This paper argues that the novella’s representations of conspiratorial Spanishness, and of the blighted and even racialized sovereignty aboard the San Dominick, register insurgent theories for inter-American, multilingual, and cross-racial solidarities.