Conflicting Corrientes: Non-Arriving Latinx Currents in Melville's 1855 Benito Cereno

Latinx subject formations are often choreographed by specific 19th Century literary histories of territory and time, usually “arriving” after the Mexican-American War and subsequent 1848 drawing of the US-Mexican border.... [ view full abstract ]

Latinx subject formations are often choreographed by specific 19th Century literary histories of territory and time, usually “arriving” after the Mexican-American War and subsequent 1848 drawing of the US-Mexican border. Recently, 19^th-century Latinx studies have challenged such fixed Latinx “arrivals” determined by national geographies of space and time. Although Herman Melville’s 1855 Benito Cereno is largely recognized as a US-American literary text, I read the novella in its transamérican contexts, suggesting that an emerging “Queer Latinx” current opens and disrupts both the even tenors in Latinx historicity and Benito Cereno’s archival placement in American literary history. While Melville’s text is positioned in the context of the coming Civil War, this teleology places the US as exceptional abolitionist geography while ignoring the significance of 1848 and the expansion of property and enslavement in Latinx territory. In other words, 1848 places Melville’s novella into a neat post-border US climate, eliding its Latinx hemispheric contexts. Working in tandem, 1848 and 1865, like 1492, operate by reproducing the colonial image environment of discovery and encounter, where Latinidad is founded by arrived at US borders. Looking beyond the literary geographies and mestiza/o family histories of Latinidad, this paper argues that the black performance and the oceanic geography of the Atlantic Middle Passage in Benito Cereno modify a Latinidad that does not depend on territorial coherence. Rather than close Latinx borders, I open up alternative corrientes, channels, and ecologies bound in watery time.