Encyclopedic Raciality: Geo-Ethnographic Speculation in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick

Abstract: This essay analyzes Moby-Dick to unpack several distinctions between the black/white binary associated with plantation slavery—with its adherence to physiognomic racism and religious discourse—and the modes of categorization available on the whaling ship. While the underlying logics of racialization are opened to ideological critique on the Pequod , they remain bound to the stereotypical vocabularies of geographic and ethnographic speculation. At the same time the logics of race and capital required that national identity be severed from Black and Indigenous categorical makeup, the ongoing expansion of the colonial project necessitated the continued existence of geographically coded raciality. While the stereotypical vocabulary remains firmly embedded in Melville's representational language, the prevalence of merchant capital works in tandem with his radical abolitionism, giving rise to a mode of racialization that is not tethered to the moral discourses which underwrite typical abolitionist literature. In Moby-Dick 's encyclopedic geographies, this essay argues, it becomes possible to constellate the overlapping knowledge-power relations that would become constitutive of contemporary racialization—and to understand that constellation as fundamental to both literary modernism and capitalist modernity.