Natural Humans, Arbitrary Persons, and Expatriated White Jackets

Meredith Farmer’s paper begins with Melville’s White-Jacket plunging into the ocean. His goal is to slice himself out of his white skin. That skin is repeatedly framed as a liability, since “most monkey jackets are of a... [ view full abstract ]

Meredith Farmer’s paper begins with Melville’s White-Jacket plunging into the ocean. His goal is to slice himself out of his white skin. That skin is repeatedly framed as a liability, since “most monkey jackets are of a dark hue,” while his is white. And that whiteness made his “identity” too “discoverable” and vulnerable since it “individualized” him and “proclaimed the name of its wearer.”  In this unexpected account of problematic whiteness, being identified by skin is framed as a foundational problem. White-Jacket’s escape into the ocean offers an alternative. A series of chemical phase changes reform him: through perpetual “fusion” with “the universe of things,” “we expatriate ourselves to nationalise with the universe.” The talk will begin with White-Jacket’s porousness, recasting humans as interstitial organisms that are always-already beside ourselves. Melville frames his protagonist as a collection of atoms that cannot be contained by the literal skin or the conceptual name that collectively produce “his” allegedly coherent legal identity. His expatriation brings us to an alternative form of law in a parallel other world: the “natural law” of “democratic elements” that manage to evade the “arbitrary laws” of the nation, which, in White-Jacket, are inextricable from the problem of environmentally impossible “persons,” contained and classified by skin.