Whiteness, Cosmopolitanism, and the Clootsian Body Politic in The Confidence-Man

Abstract: This essay locates Melville's cosmopolitan aesthetics in his recurring references to the historical personage of Anacharsis Cloots—a figure from the French Revolution whose political theater on behalf of worldwide equality ended in his execution. Assembling representatives of different races and nations, Melville's narrators create picturesque tableaus that evoke Cloots's idealistic vision of cosmopolitics without merely affirming his utopian optimism. Rather, Melville's work reveals the problem of single voices who appoint themselves as spokesmen for a cosmopolitan demos . His characters repeatedly attempt to masquerade their whiteness as if it were able to encompass—or simply be—an interracial assembly of mankind. In The Confidence-Man , Melville grafts the picturesque spectacle of Clootsian assembly onto the character of the cosmopolitan, whose embodiment of interracial collectivity, I argue, amounts to whiteness in disguise. The cosmopolitan's masquerade attempts to collapse political vision and action, troubling the possibility that we can harness the "energies" of Melville's most elaborate Cloots deputation without also understanding the racialized and erotic investments that the cosmopolitan has in his own politics. I end with a brief consideration of the African sailor from Billy Budd , whose position dramatizes the Clootsian vision at its "ragged edges" between utopia and what Melville refers to as "more reality, than real life itself can show."