Melville’s Queer Afterlives: Introduction: Snatches of History

Abstract: This special issue collects case studies that highlight the range of queer Melvilleana and in the process contribute to an understanding of the aesthetic shape assumed by queer creative impulses. “Melville’s queer afterlives” names an archive of engagements with and revisions of the work of Herman Melville that extend beyond the scholarly. These afterlives are queer in multiple senses: anchored in Melville’s own interests in sex, gender, sexuality, and the relationships between them, as well as positioned against social expectations, perceptions, categories, and norms, these afterlives offer instead interpretations of and responses to Melville that foreground, refashion, and develop the imaginative possibilities that his work proposes, or even just suggests. This introduction to the special issue charts a few lineages, both scholarly and not, through which we can contextualize Melville’s queer afterlives, and it hazards some explanations for why Melville and his work have become such lush sites for queer engagement. In tracking Melville’s queer afterlives, the contributors to this issue perform a method of reading and narrating the past that troubles the disciplinary requirements and truth effects of history and, in the process, create new imaginaries for its enactment and reenactment.