Melville and the Idea of Blackness

By examining the unique problems that ''blackness'' signifies in Moby-Dick, Pierre, ''Benito Cereno'' and ''The Encantadas'', Christopher Freeburg analyzes how Herman Melville grapples with the social realities of racial difference in nineteenth-century America. Where Melville''s critics typically read blackness as either a metaphor for the haunting power of slavery or an allegory of moral evil, F...