SPEAKER_01 0:00

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather a vague and nameless horror concerning him, which at times, by its intensity, completely overpowered all the rest, and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. How can I hope to explain myself here? And yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naughty.

SPEAKER_04 1:02

I am your host, Tristan Bavil Marquise, and today we are welcoming Naima Karshmar to the pod. Would you please tell us a bit about yourself, Naeema?

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Hello, I'm so happy to be here. My name is Naeema. I'm a PhD candidate in English and critical theory at UC Berkeley. Um, and I work on Melville as part of my broader research on racialization and kind of the earlier periods of American colonization.

SPEAKER_04 1:30

Wonderful, thank you very much. Um, I'm very interested in how you first became interested in Melville.

SPEAKER_00 1:36

Oh, that's a great question. I have such a boring answer, which is that it was on my qualifying exam for the American 19th century. Um, the reason I became fascinated was because, as I said, I work on like race and racialization. Um, and when I was reading Moby Dick for the first time uh and uh Benito Sereno, um, one of his short stories, I was really, really struck by how um uh weird and complicated his engagement with race was. You know, normally when you read an author from um the early American 19th century, um, you're gonna get uh like either you're gonna get like sentimental fiction, um like Uncle Tom's Cabin or something like that. That's that's um this sort of straightforward and and kind of like simpering um abolitionist text that is like we should free the slaves out of the goodness of our hearts, um, or you're gonna get something really virulently racist, right? Um and Melville is really neither. He's really like interested in um uh how it becomes possible to talk about somebody as having a race at all. And that makes for some really weird, complicated, interesting passages, particularly in a in a book like um like Boby Dick, which is our um the the inauguration of what we would call encyclopedic fiction, right? Like this um this huge uh grappling with all sorts of knowledge that he's trying to bring into the page and and represent in fiction. Um so the the how I became interested, not very interesting. Um, but I think I think the reason for my interest um is is maybe more fun to talk about.

SPEAKER_04 3:32

Sure, yeah. And so uh that that makes perfect sense. Um now I invited you onto the show because I found your article uh in the most recent edition of Leviathan very fascinating. Um and if any of our listeners don't know, Leviathan is a wonderful scholarly journal published by the Melville Society. Now, your article entitled Encyclopedic Raciality, Geoethnographic Speculation and Herman Melville's Moby Day. Um so like uh you talked about it a bit, but like what inspired you to write uh this particular article?

SPEAKER_00 3:58

Yeah, this is um an adaptation of a dissertation chapter of mine. Basically, I was curious about what happens in fiction that is trying to represent a racial subject, right? Like it has to, like the job of the fiction writer is to paint a picture for the reader. So um what Melville is trying to do is to say, hey, there's this like uh cannibal savage that is really, really crucial to the story. Um, and here are the words I'm gonna use to describe this character. Um, but he's also really skeptical of those same paradigms. So even as he is um talking about Kuiqueg as um this uh sort of uncivilized racial other, he's also spending a lot of time untangling like why we would think of this person as inferior or this perspective as inferior. Um and he does a lot of uh comparisons between the the so-called cannibal and um the sort of upright liberal Christian subject. Um and most of the time when he's doing those sort of hierarchical comparisons, uh actually the the cannibals come come out to be uh superior. Um so he inverts the the typical hierarchy. So that was the starting point for the article. I was like, wow, this is really deeply critical of racial subjugation, and at the same time, it's it's completely reliant on a stereotypical racial vocabulary. So how how do we start to understand that dynamic? Um and it kind of it kind of spiraled out from there.

SPEAKER_04 5:44

No, that makes a lot of sense. Uh continuing with a Kuiquag permit, then um, so in your article, you write um of him as as if he's sort of like a hodgepodge of different stereotypes of savagery, where you can't exactly place like, you know, uh what ethnic or racial category is supposed to be. Can you talk to us a little bit more about this uh uh this aspect of Queequeg?

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Yeah, it's a really fascinating thing that that starts to happen um with the rise of industrial capitalism, you also get abstraction, um by which we mean like sort of generalization of racial categories as like um part and parcel of the way those categories take shape. So like um instead of having somebody from a specific place and a set of characteristics that you would associate with that place, um, you instead have something that is just like cannibal. Um there's no associated real-world location. Um critics will sometimes say Quequeg is Polynesian, which sure is possible, but there's nothing in the novel itself to support that. Um, and that's actually like quite similar to the way that um blackness takes shape also around this time, is you suddenly have this category of person that um isn't associated with a particular religion, uh, isn't associated with a particular location, and is only associated with um either physiognomic or cultural characteristics. Um, in the case of Kuiqueg, um, what's interesting about that is that his race seems to just be cannibal. Um and there are all of these long passages about um his skin color and about his savager and about the possibility that he might become civilized. Um there are also long passages about his religious practices. Um but what Melville is doing is drawing from uh a sort of dizzying array of source texts, mostly European travel narratives, which are um largely fiction anyway. Um but he's drawing from all of these source texts to create this sort of hodgepodge that goes into Kuiqueg's racial makeup, um, and that from the perspective of the novel is is somewhat coherent because, again, he's a novelist, he's he's building a character that you have to sort of be able to reliably understand. Um but if you drill down into the specifics, um none of these characteristics really make a ton of sense together. Um, and so it's like it's like he is drawing our attention to the absurdity of his source text and the absurdity of thinking about the world and other people this way. Um, and at the same time, he he's he's using all of those source texts to still maintain um their legibility um or their function as um something that we can read, see, and think, yeah, that seems plausible, right? Um so quequeg is a fascinating character to me for many reasons other than that one, but that's the first thing I would say.

SPEAKER_04 9:03

Yeah, yeah. You you get into uh the the purplish yellowness of uh Queekweg skin as sort of like a uh characteristic of this ambiguity.

SPEAKER_00 9:10

Yeah, exactly. And like what even is purplish yellow? Like you that's not even a color, right? Like, even if we were divorcing it from skin color, it would be very difficult to picture that um out in the world. So yeah, it's just so profoundly strange and so interesting.

SPEAKER_04 9:27

Wonderful. Um, so uh at the core, so as far as I can tell, at the core of your argument is that Melville uses epistemology to destabilize racial capitalist ideology. Now, our our audience is composed of very intelligent people, but would you be so kind as to break this down for us a bit? Uh, what is racial capitalist ideology? What is epistemology, and how can the latter destabilize the former?

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Yeah, that's a great question. Um, and uh I myself don't totally know the answer. But um basically, so if you talk to any Marxist, they're gonna have opinions about what ideology means. Um it's a very sort of fraud-contested term. Um I make a slight distinction between the two terms that could be synonymous, epistemology and ideology, um, because um I think that when you talk about epistemology, um the very basic definition is what we know and how we know it. That's like that branch of philosophy. Um ideology typically is like knowledge with an agenda. It's like how we function under capitalism. We look at something like value, we look at something like profit, we look at something like money, and to us it seems uh like that's a a tangible thing that we can count on. Uh, in fact, totally irrational, right? Um, and so money is the sort of um paradigmatic example of an ideological thing that that still has force in the world. Um so racial capitalist, you just add racial capitalists to that term ideology, which you can think of as knowledge with an agenda. Uh racial capitalist ideology is just um this uh this set of paradigms on which we operate, um, that are designed to uphold uh all of the functions of capitalism, including racial hierarchy, right? Like race is really essential, especially to the establishment of American capitalism, because America is um one of the nations in the world that is most economically reliant on plantation slavery. So uh so, in order for the entire economic edifice of this country to function, um, it needed racial hierarchy. Melville's epistemologies, um okay. So maybe the first thing I'll say is that actually you can't um there there's nothing you can say or like uh think or write that is actually gonna um make a make a tangible dent in racial capitalism. That's not really how discourse works, in my opinion. Some people will disagree with me. Um but uh but Melville is trying very, very hard to interrogate those paradigms. Um and he's using epistemology to do so. Um, epistemology just being like um knowledge, right? So this is the this is the encyclopedia. He's like, okay, so we have this thing that we're supposed to believe, this thing being racial hierarchy, and then we have all of the things that underpin it, all of these texts that these people have spent so much time writing, um, these travelogues, these aesthetic tracts, um, these encyclopedia entries, he spends a long time in phrenology, right, um, and uh and skull shapes and uh bone structure, all of these various sets of quote-unquote knowledge that have established themselves as knowledge that are supposedly serving as as evidentiary bases for um the function of race and racialization. But what Melville shows us is that if you model all of these um things, all of these texts and all of these evidentiary practices together, um they're completely incoherent. They make no sense, right? So um so that is that's the like that's the um destabilization function.

SPEAKER_04 13:55

Uh are you able to highlight some examples of uh Melville using epistemology in this way?

SPEAKER_00 14:00

Yeah, for sure. My favorite is the part where he's uh talking about cetology, right? Like the study of whales. Um and there's this moment on page 390 of the text that I'm using, which um uh not everybody has to use, but maybe you can um hunt it down. We're talking about the the sperm whales back. Um and he he refers to when he's talking about the different categories of whales, there's this sort of like um implicit comparison with the different categories of race and human beings, and sometimes the analogy also becomes explicit. So for instance, when he talks about the sperm whale, um, its back is Ethiopian. I think that's just like self-evidently absurd. Um but uh but also there's nothing stopping him from making that comparison, and in fact, it is also a comparison that shows up in a lot of earlier texts, um, where like uh somehow national categories, racial categories are associated with like the natural world. Um, and this is an attempt to naturalize um uh a social construct, right? Um so so that's one fun um example. There are also all of those sections on phrenology where he's like talking about the shape of the whale's skull, and he's like, uh, I don't remember the exact quote, but it's something like he taught he talks about um a whale skull being like a black George Washington. Um and you can kind of feel him laughing every time he does this. He's like, look how ridiculous this is. Um I'm gonna do it, but it is clearly a joke, you know?

SPEAKER_04 15:50

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I I think there's a sincerity to to Melville, but he's very rarely serious. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:56

He's uh Yeah, no, that's a great distinction.

SPEAKER_04 16:01

Uh your article also refers to Melville's uh radical abolitionism, um, either him like having a radical abolitionism or their one being uh president in Moby Dick. Uh so what evidence do you see uh uh for this characterization of Melville as either having a radical abolitionism or uh potentially being a radical abolitionist?

SPEAKER_00 16:18

Um yeah, I think it's Benito Sereno, right? Like that would be the um the the kind of most self-evident example. Um uh for those who don't know, Benito Sereno is a short story based on a based on a um a real circumstance um of a slave rebellion. Um and Melville writes this uh historical account um in a very strange uh pseudo-gothic kind of horror style. Um and basically what he does is he inhabits the white perspective, right? Um, but he he also um demonstrates the ignorance of that perspective because what ends up happening in that story is um the captains of the slave ships look at their uh black servants and automatically think of them as lesser than, um as stupid. And what that does is it opens the white men to uh complete and total manipulation by these black subjects um because they're obviously not stupid, um, but they know how the white man is perceiving them, and then they are able to use that to stage a rebellion. Um and uh Melville, I think, is uh is very sympathetic to the slave revolt um in that text, but also in Moby Dick, uh, where every every black character who enters that space is potentially a slave on land. Um, right? We're still in that era. Uh on the ship, there's no category of slavery. Um, and I think that's very intentional, um, this disruption of structural hierarchy that at the time would have been conventional. Um he's very interested in making his his black characters actual characters with agency and with and with lives. And in the case of uh Pip with this sort of like epic tragic arc that has uh interiority and depth um and uh is just like deeply, deeply sad because uh, you know, Pip is is stranded out on the ocean, goes mad, um, loses all of his brightness. Um, but nowhere in that story is like Pip's uh status as a potential slave um really vitally important to what goes on with his character. Um and I think that's very, very intentional, which isn't to say that Melville's not racist. Um he I think I think he like most men of his time pretty clearly is, it's just that um he is more deeply invested in disrupting hierarchy um than a lot of his contemporaries.

SPEAKER_04 19:29

No, that's fascinating. There's a there's a number of things, uh another number of threads we could go off from that. To go back a few steps, um I think uh uh both in Benito Serrano uh and in uh Bartleby, uh you have sort of similar uh unreliable narrators or unreliable like uh um protagonists, if you will, um, who are these uh these white men in positions of power who like fundamentally like don't understand uh something about the situation that they're in. Um and I think it's interesting like you could uh uh like looking at both those stories, uh one in the context of a slave revolt and the other in the context of uh like the exploitation of uh in in this case, uh more closer to like white-collar labor. Um I I think they're both very interesting. I I think it's interesting for him to use this like sort of unreliable narrator that kind of goes through like the thought processes and like has the same sort of blind spots um as like uh uh the the the hegemonic force like in his civilization at the time.

SPEAKER_00 20:35

Yeah, totally. I mean, yeah, you bring up Bartleby, which is also a really interesting case. Uh I mean I think like don't you think that that is also very um uh a very anti-capitalist piece of writing, even though he's like writing from the position of the of the bourgeois subject?

SPEAKER_04 20:52

Oh, absolutely. And I think that's inten I think it's sort of intentional in both regards, right? So like in both cases, like the the character that's leading us through these encounters um like is that sort of bourgeois uh uh like white male subject. Um yeah, I think that's absolutely intentional. And and the sort of uh uh idiocy of both of these characters, or like at least like the cultural blind spots that they have, or like class blind spots that they have, uh make them like kind of compelling and like make their like the both of their critiques more incisive, I think.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

Yeah, totally. Yeah. Um yeah, and it's totally fascinating because we we think of the novel like uh in literary history, like the conventional narrative is um like the novel uh is the form that invents or first represents in fiction the bourgeois subject. So like that's why people are obsessed with Robinson Crusoe because it's like the first instance of us having um like homo economicists or or like the capitalist. Um and it's really fascinating in Melville to have that also taking place. Place as like kind of like an imminent critique, um, or as like uh like an inhabitation of a subjectivity that he's like really clearly very critical of. Um yeah, as you say, it's a really it's a really fascinating interplay.

SPEAKER_03 22:18

So uh going back to another interesting thread that you brought up, um, so you forefront the chapter Midnight Folk's as being especially important for understanding Moby Dick as a whole. Um can you talk to us a bit about that?

SPEAKER_00 22:32

Yeah, for sure. I mean, up until this point, I think um the a lot of things happen to the text. It's uh it it changes um in terms of its style, it changes in form, and it changes in genre. Um and it's also the moment where it goes from being uh interested in like uh a wide variety of uh race subjects and others to being explicitly preoccupied with blackness. Um and this is also the first moment where we don't have Ishmael as um what we would call a focalizer, so like the the the gaze, the perspective through which the narrative is unfolding. Um that gets suspended because what happens in this chapter, as you know, and um a lot of your listeners probably also know, is that it's a play. Um, it's just dialogue. Um and it uh it's modeling a storm, um, and it's also modeling the racial tensions between all of the sailors on the ship, all of whom are from different places. Um and you have uh this um really interesting interplay between the sailors, the the old Manx sailor, the Spanish sailor, the St. Jago sailor, and the Nantucket sailor, and then you have Dagoo, who is um a black harpoonier. And he says, Who's afraid of blacks? Afraid of me, and then uh we have the Spanish sailor saying something very racist, and then saying no offense, um, and Dagu kind of saying none. Um, and then eventually they provoke him into attacking. The the way that race takes shape on the page here is like so significant to the unfolding of the narrative. I like I say in the article that um blackness is what is what transforms it into an epic, um, because we have uh an explicit Shakespearean illusion, we have the comparison between Dagu and Capital uh and Caliban, sorry, from um Shakespeare's The Tempest. And uh we have this like very clear um sense in which Degu is actually in fact the hero of the play, and the um the white men emerge as uh these kind of idiotic uh instigators of racialized violence.

SPEAKER_04 25:33

When I was rereading some of the relevant chapters uh to prepare for this interview, one of the things that uh struck me that uh hadn't struck me in the past is so like in in that uh encounter you're talking about between the Spanish sailor and Dagu, there's also another sailor who's uh written as being a Saint Iago um sailor. And so I I don't know if it has had occurred to you before or like to what extent um this is uh intentionally done, but uh Iago obviously is uh uh the like the the villain of Othello. Do you think this is like an uh an intentional uh decision on Melville's part to uh to make this uh sailor specifically a Saint Iago sailor in that sense?

SPEAKER_00 26:13

Oh my god, that's so interesting. No, but you should write in and add that to the article. That had not occurred to me. Um yeah, totally. I could totally see that. Um, you know, uh Yago is a Cape Verdean island, um, but it is, yeah, it is also um the name of the sort of uh snivelling instigator in in um Othello and the the driver of all evil. Um yeah, that's a really um interesting parallel. Um yeah. Somebody should write that article, maybe you.

SPEAKER_03 26:53

Yeah, uh maybe me. Uh maybe me. Uh anyway, uh moving forward, uh so thinking about the chapter Midnight Folksal.

SPEAKER_04 27:01

We were talking about Pitt before. Um so at the end of this chapter, you get you get this uh soliloquy from Pip. Um a very fascinating soliloquy. Um, and this is the immediate context for the chapters Moby Dick and then uh the whiteness of the whale. Um, what do you think is the significance of Pitt's soliloquy being uh immediately before these two chapters?

SPEAKER_00 27:22

I think that it's like the most moving and deeply tragic uh moment in this entire book um is this soliloquy where he's looking at the storm and you have uh this um comparison between the the white squall, right? The the the actual literal white um storm formation um and uh the white man and the white whale. Um and all of it is like uh completely terrifying to Pip. Um, but this is where like the Shakespearean illusion continues. Um, but he's he's sort of functioning like the fool does in Shakespeare, right? Where like the fool will be next to a king and will be able to say the truths that nobody else on stage can get away with saying. Um and what Pip is saying in this moment when you really parse it is like um God has completely uh God has forsaken this little black boy who is standing here um uh facing uh all of this whiteness, this like enormous, um epic, uh terrifying whiteness that is um threatening his his very life, uh, but also um his soul. And uh you asked about the the significance of this moment um coming right before the chapters uh Moby Dick and the whiteness of the whale. Um I think uh in if you if you take that soliloquy as I do to be a kind of volta or turning point um in the narrative, uh then you have to also understand that it's not only whiteness is is not only a threat to the black subject, um is not only devastating to a character like Pip, um, it's also uh it's also dangerous to everyone on board, including the white men themselves. It's it's it's this kind of thing that um robs them of everything. And of course, uh at the very end, um Ishmael is is the only survivor, right? So um so I think I think the significance of this moment really can't be overstated if you're if you're looking at race in this book.

SPEAKER_04 29:59

Wonderful, thank you. Um so you state in the article that Moby Dick is a fundamentally different kind of abolitionist text. Now, some members of our audience may be unfamiliar with what is typical of abolitionist literature contemporary with Melville. Um, what is this typical abolitionist literature like, and what about Moby Dick makes it distinct?

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Yeah, I love that question because it it lets me nerd out about my my fields. Okay, so in the 18th century, abolitionism is uh taking place, sort of inaugurated by um the slave narrative. I mean, like before uh Aquiano's interesting narrative, which is the first that we think of as the first slave narrative, um, you have a bunch of like political tracks, and so like people, various white guys are making speeches, right? Um, and they're like, hey, this is you know, this goes against God, or this goes against humanity, or this is unprincipled, or like maybe we could get rid of like a certain part of slavery. Like uh a big argument in the sort of earlier 18th century was um, well, we could, we don't have to completely abandon plantation slavery or already established slavery, uh, but we could get rid of the slave trade, right? We could just stop kidnapping people from Africa. That might be cool. Um and then in the 19th century, when Melville is writing, uh plantation slavery is very firmly established, and so you get the rise of uh sentimental fiction. Um, so you still have slave narratives as um the the obviously the driving force of abolitionism, um this first-person autobiographical account of slavery's horrors, um, but you also have white writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe. Um, and so uh the sentimental novel is is really like uh what gains the most popularity um around uh around the Civil War. Um and that text typically is gonna be something like uh we are God-fearing, virtuous people, um, and as such, we uh should recognize that these uh black people, however inferior and savage and uncivilized, they are still humans and they deserve our mercy and our love. And so it's this very like condescending kind of like uh uh Christian um morally coded narrative um that uh that people really latch onto and that is enormously successful. Um Melville isn't doing that, right? Melville, like if anything, Christianity is under attack um by Melville's writing. It's satirized pretty ruthlessly. Um he's also like not interested in being uh super um sentimental about his abolitionism. It's just like his his take on racial hierarchy is like this is self-evidently absurd. Um it doesn't make any sense, and also it's uh part and parcel of like capitalist hierarchy, which also um is oppressive to literally everyone. It's not that like these uh slaves are these um horrible um emaciated victims that are completely lacking in agency. It's like, no, they are um suffering uh under capitalism as are we all. Um and so it just doesn't um it just doesn't make any logical sense to keep it intact as um as a political force. Um but that's the main difference, I think, is that it's just that Melville is is really lacking in sentimentality about it.

SPEAKER_04 33:54

Wonderful. Okay. Um so one of the most striking chapters for me from the perspective of race has always been Stubb Stubbs Supper and Stubbs Interactions with Pequad's unnamed black cook. How do you interpret this chapter?

SPEAKER_00 34:06

Um, this is like uh this is really interesting, um, and I I'm glad you brought it up. This is where um the the Roanoke River is explicitly mentioned. So Stubb has this like um back and forth with the cook where um he's uh he's trying to get information from Stubb, like uh, you know, where were you born? Um what nationality are you, what what religion are you? And Stubb is kind of like, and and sorry, the cook is kind of um resistant to this, but he's not like he's not being well, he's he's kind of being intentionally like fuck you, you know. Um, but he's also it's just true that he doesn't have a birthplace. And this doesn't make any sense to Stubb at all. Um, like the cook's response to where were you born is um in a in a ferry boat going over the Roanoke. Um, and that's a significant illusion um because uh Roanoke country, um, the Roanoke River in particular was a uh a route along the Underground Railroad. Um, and it was uh a sort of famous conduit among slave watermen um for spreading uh revolutionary ideology um and in particular spreading information about the Haitian Revolution. Um so so the cook is uh very clearly an ex-slave and a fugitive. Um and what's what's kind of funny about this encounter is that uh Stubb has no framework for understanding any of what that means. It's entirely incumbent on the reader to see the the word Roanoke and be like, oh, um actually, yes, the cook must be um have have had a brush with slavery at some point, uh, and must have also had a brush with with its overthrow.

SPEAKER_04 36:11

Yeah, no, that that's very interesting. Um so fun uh auto bi autobiographical fact uh for the audience about me. So I I was born in uh Roanoke, Virginia. Oh my god. And they they put an extra they put an extra syllable in there than you'd expect. Okay. Uh it's like uh so it's inexplicably three syllables long, Roanoke. Um but uh yeah, no, so uh no, that's very fascinating. Um one of the things for me, uh like uh uh Stubb's character is undeniably very, very racist in this interaction. And then but you also get like uh this uh resistance to this from the uh the cooks. Um what do you see in that?

SPEAKER_00 36:48

It's kind of like a little bit of a of a wink um on Melville's part because um Stubb doesn't exactly come off as like a sympathetic character. Um he has depth and humanity, like kind of every character. Melville doesn't really stage anyone as uh a so-called flat character. Um but uh but we're not like really on his side during this interaction. He's he's very um sort of tyrannical, he orders the servants around. And uh so it kind of it kind of reminds me of Benito Sereno, the way this plays out, the way that there's like a black servant character who um is uh too, according to the person they're talking to, is inferior in every way and is kind of entirely flat. But actually, to the reader, um, when you're looking at this interaction, it's kind of self-evident that the the white guy is really is really dumb and the black character is is the smart one and is kind of manipulating him or challenging him, you know.

SPEAKER_04 37:53

Absolutely, and and specifically in this interaction of the two characters, the one that becomes uh likened to an animal, right, is Stub, right? So, you know, uh uh ongoing in this chapter is the the the voracious uh eating of these sharks of the the whale's carcass that's uh uh moored up uh against the the ship. Um and uh basically uh towards the end of that chapter, if I'm remembering correctly, the cook uh refers to Stub as being uh massa shark.

SPEAKER_00 38:22

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. You're yeah, you're totally right. It's it's Stub that's that's animalistic here.

SPEAKER_04 38:32

Wonderful. Um and continuing this theme of like talking about uh um like animals, uh so you you mentioned that race in the text stretches its referential field over both humans and objects. To what extent do you view animals and chiefly whales as being included in that spread?

SPEAKER_00 38:49

Um I think they're I think they're very much included. Um I spent a while uh very nerdily like going through the cytology sections and and counting the racial reference. Um didn't make it into the article. Nobody wanted my like charts of uh of um I want your shoes.

SPEAKER_04 39:10

Send them to me.

SPEAKER_00 39:11

Okay, I would be happy to. Um but uh yeah, absolutely. I mean, he's fascinated by cytology, and it's it's the a sort of exhausting section to read, right? Like these like long this whale uh has these characteristics and migrates in these areas, and here's what we know, and here are all of the like citations for how we know about this whale. Um but also in there are a lot of moments uh where like um the shape of this whale's head uh reminds us of this racial group, or uh um, or the people he's citing also are like natural philosophers who are uh writing about whales um and also have written uh scientific tracks um about racial makeup. Um and they're using the same, they they're claiming the same sort of authority for um for both. So I think I I mean it's not um I'm not gonna go so far as to say that like those sections are um primarily about race. Um I think they're they're part of a broader project. Um, but uh but they're it's very clear if you read them closely um that uh race makes its way into um natural philosophy and uh and science. It becomes part of uh these other supposedly empirical, supposedly objective knowledge paradigms. Um and so that's really fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 40:46

No, that's totally right. And I think a lot of people uh who you know aren't as familiar like uh uh get to the acetology sections and uh like expect it it's just like kind of some dry uh scientific like you know uh 19th century like attempt at like science or something like that. But they're really funny. And like uh uh I think people don't realize this, like and to a certain extent, I view them as like uh lampooning a lot of uh uh like uh attempts at science from the time. So like I I you know I encourage people to like take a close look at them, uh you know, and not to scoff too much at them.

SPEAKER_00 41:20

Yeah, totally. They are satirical.

SPEAKER_04 41:24

Wonderful. And then uh finally, uh before we let you go, uh what to you is the significance of the whiteness of the whale?

SPEAKER_00 41:30

Yeah, I mean that's that's a huge question. Um, but uh what I would say uh like that chapter, like the whiteness of the whale, is uh a little bit similar to the Cetology sections in that it's kind of meticulously going through every association we have with whiteness and being like, well, it's not about this, it's not about like the beauty of the pearl because um that uh doesn't make any sense, but it's also about um this other aesthetic principle, and it's also about uh races of men. Um and so the book is very uh fundamentally interested in um in whiteness, obviously, uh on a conceptual level, and um everything that it symbolizes and everything that it represents and everything it's associated with is kind of catalogued and subject to critique in that chapter. Um one thing I'll say so there are a million things that a million critics have said about uh the fact that the whale is a white whale. Um what has what I've been thinking about lately is that um it is typically when we think about the beautiful and the sublime in aesthetic theory. Um uh sublimity is associated with terror. Um so that's why there are a lot of books on um on Melville's sublime, uh, because it's this like um it's it's the human being confronting something beyond our comprehension, either because it's too big or because it's a threat to our lives. In traditional aesthetic theory, sublimity, that that sense of terror, that like visceral fear is associated with blackness. So for uh someone like Edmund Burke, who is one of the forefathers of aesthetics, um uh it is always darkness that is um, and I I I can quote directly by nature terrible. Um and in Melville the ultimate sublime creature is in fact white. Um so that's just a very basic and very fundamental inversion of our typical chains of associative reasoning vis-a-vis whiteness and blackness and uh terror and sublimity. Um and and I think that's on purpose. Um, and I think that that is uh really fascinating and really emblematic of the entire project.

SPEAKER_04 44:13

Well, thank you so much for joining us, uh Naeema, and it's been a wonderful conversation. Uh audience, I highly rec encourage all of you to read uh Naeema's article on Leviathan, Encyclopedic Raciality, Geoethnographic Speculation, and Herman Melville's movie Dick. Naima, is there anything else you would like to share or plug for our audience?

SPEAKER_00 44:32

Oh no, I don't do anything. I just read my books. But but this was a really fun conversation, and and thank you so much, Tristan. Um, and I'm really excited to listen to all of the other episodes of the podcast.

SPEAKER_04 44:43

Oh, wonderful. Well, thank you so much again for your time.

SPEAKER_00 44:46

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 44:49

You've been listening to the Pequod Pod with Tristan Babel Marquise, Meg Francher, and Johnny Wiles. You can support the show by visiting patreon.com forward slash pequadpod, throw us a tabloon or two for some bonus content, and to help to keep the show going full sale. Thank you for listening, and until next time, call us the Pequad Podcast.