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The Shrouded Women of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno

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The Shrouded Women of Herman Melville's Benito Cereno In Transit: Women, Photography, and The Consolidation of Race in Nineteenth-Century America by Brenna M. Casey Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Cathy N. Davidson ___________________________ Rebecca L. Stein ___________________________ Thomas J. Ferraro Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 ABSTRACT In Transit: Women, Photography, and The Consolidation of Race in Nineteenth-Century America by Brenna M. Casey Department of English Duke University Date:_______________________ Approved: ___________________________ Priscilla Wald, Supervisor ___________________________ Cathy N. Davidson ___________________________ Rebecca L. Stein ___________________________ Thomas J. Ferraro An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English in the Graduate School of Duke University 2017 Copyright by Brenna M. Casey 2017 Abstract In Transit: Women, Photography, and the Consolidation of Race in Nineteenth-Century America charts the accretion of historical and often obscured memory upon our textual and visual world. Rapid innovations in transportation and photographic technologies developed alongside processes of violent racialized conflict in the antebellum United States. The coincidence of these phenomena in the long nineteenth-century elaborated racial and gender differences through textual and visual production. This dissertation analyzes the evidences of these naturalized narratives in the oscillating movements of women required to navigate multiple, indiscrete, and often unconventional identity categories. In Transit traces the physical, textual, and imagistic movements of three figures of intrigue—colonial Peru’s tapada limeña, the sensational white captive Olive Oatman, and the famed abolitionist Sojourner Truth. It does so at three flashpoints of United States policy that mark the violent refinement of racial and gender formations: the specter of Latin American independence, Indian Removal, and the protracted Abolition of Slavery. This project demonstrates the ways in which white Americans of the nineteenth-century turned to cultural and commercially available representations of gendered and racialized difference to make sense of their quickly shifting world. These cultural products of Enlightenment-era Europe—travelogues and art works that could help piece together the meaning of new persons represented by new media—are deeply vi implicated by long histories of colonialism, enslavement, and empire. This project contends that formations of race and racist ideology in the United States are the outcome of the dense transfer of interracial intimacy across global networks. By demonstrating the permeability of narrative and photographic frames for these women and others like them, this project exposes both penetrable national borders and porous boundaries of abiding racial identities. vii For Mary, Catherine, and Ann viii Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... xi Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................... xiii Introduction: Lookout Points ...................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1. “Peering Across the Plaza”: The Shrouded Women of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno ................................................................................................................................. 27 1.1 “The One Anomaly”: Women on Deck ....................................................................... 32 1.2 “Angels with Claws”: Hiding in Plain Sight .............................................................. 36 1.3 “The Treacherous Shawl”: Ethnic Fugitivity .............................................................. 42 1.4 “Decidedly Orientatlist Flavor”: Incommensurate Equivalencies .......................... 50 1.5 “The Past is Passed”: Abandonded Memory ............................................................. 66 Chapter 2. “Had I Home”: The Visual and Narrative Circulatins of Olive Oatman ........ 70 2.1 Captive Grammar ........................................................................................................... 82 2.2 “Upon My Figurehead”: The Permanence of Racial Permeability ......................... 89 2.3 “It Was Light Covering”: Respectable Looking ......................................................... 98 2.4 “I Should Like To Live Here”: Reading Captivity ................................................... 111 2.5 “She Is One of Us”: Set in Stone ................................................................................. 123 2.6 “Had I Home”: The Lecture Circuit ........................................................................... 135 Chapter 3. “I Did Not Run Away; I Walked”: The Liberatory Wanderings of Sojourner Truth ........................................................................................................................................... 146 3.1 “Annialated Distance”: The Materiality of Mobility ............................................... 157 3.2 “Trusts Her Scribe”: Contextualizing Narrative ...................................................... 161 ix 3.3 “And He Did Not Dislike the Journey: Reading The Narrative of Sojourner Truth ............................................................................................................................................... 167 3.4 “I Never Make Use of the Word Honey”: The Libyan Sibyl .................................. 178 3.5 “I Sell the Shadow”: Carpetbagging Portraiture ..................................................... 191 3.6 From Indiana to Jupiter: Truth’s Meandering Ethnic Performance ...................... 199 Coda ............................................................................................................................................ 208 Works Cited ............................................................................................................................... 222 Biography ................................................................................................................................... 234 x List of Figures Figure 1. Andrew Craft, [Playstrcuture at The CottonMill], The Guardian, 9 October 2014. .......................................................................................................................................................... 3 Figure 2. Andrew Craft, [Claudia Lacy holding portraits of her son, Lennon], The Guardian, 12 Dec 2014. .................................................................................................................. 7 Figure 3. [Screenshot of GroupMe Messages], The Verge, 11 November 2016. .................. 25 Figure 4. [Carte de visite of saya y manto], ca. 1860. ............................................................. 30 Figure 5. Johann Mortiz Rugendas. The Paseo in the Alameda gardens, overlooking the Romac and Lima, ca. 1843. ........................................................................................................................ 37 Figure 6. Léonce Angrand, Announcement of a Cockfight, ca. 1833. ....................................... 58 Figure 7. Olive Oatman, Tintype, 1857. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. ........................................................................................................................... 72 Figure 8. Locking Thermoplast Union Case, exterior and interior, ca. 1859. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. ........................................................... 77 Figure 9. Olive Oatman and Lorenzo Oatman, Tintypes, 1857. Beinecke Rare Book Manuscript Library, Yale University. ...................................................................................... 78 Figure 10. George E. Noyes, Ship's Female Figurehead, ca. 1860. New Bedford Whaling Museum. ....................................................................................................................................... 91 Figure 11. Loryea & Macauly Souvenir Studio, "Olive Oatman," Carte de visite, ca. 1858. History San Jose Research Library. .......................................................................................... 99 Figure 12. "Indian Skulking to Hear the Conversation of the Girls," 1858, Captivity of the Oatman Girls, added as part of the 3rd. ed. ........................................................................... 102 Figure 13. "Death of Mary Ann at the Indian Camp," 1857. Captivity of the Oatman Girls. ...................................................................................................................................................... 103 Figure 14. "Olive Oatman" Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 1st ed., 1857. ............................. 105 Figure 15. "Olive Oatman," Captivity of the Oatman Girls, 3rd ed., 1858. ....................... 106 xi Figure 16. Erastus Dow Palmer, The White Captive,
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