On the second day of the New England Colored Citizens Convention of 1858 in New Bedford, Massachusetts, a committee composed of prominent African American men passed a resolution stating “Resolved, That though some colored Americans have been induced, from various promptings, to increase their fortunes by leaving their homes for other climes, the majority are now, as ever, determined to remain in the Unites States until, at least, the last fetter falls from the last American slave” (“Anniversary” 1858). Only one member opposed the resolution, Mr. Henson of Canada, who “did not think the Convention had a right to dictate what action colored people in other states should adopt.”Footnote 1 The conversation among African American leaders in the North, as this example makes clear, took seriously the complexity of the politics of mobility. Though the Fugitive Slave Law had made the north into a more dangerous space for formerly enslaved people, and even for freeborn African Americans, there was still an impetus to remain in this contested space in order to create a critical mass that would not be intimidated by its fraught legal position. Some eight years earlier at the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law Convention in Cazenovia, New York, where Frederick Douglass presided, the focus was also on the politics of mobility, but its emphasis differed. Its minutes, an open letter, and the convention’s 17 resolutions were published in Douglass’s newspaper, The North Star. The open letter emphasizes that free African Americans of the north commit an act tantamount to treason when they attend a church with segregated pews. In addition, the second resolution of the convention states, “every man who is in [slavery] is bound to get out of it, if he can” (“A Letter” 1850). Douglass and the others make it an ethical duty for the enslaved person to turn his or her motility, potential for spatial movement, into mobility, even at great personal risk.

These two positions, the duty to stay and fight versus the duty to escape, present a tension. The former suggests that abolition can and will occur within the borders of the United States, and the latter suggests that freedom may only be possible through mobility, and particularly mobility outside of the borders of the United States, since the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 had made northern states as dangerous for formerly enslaved people as southern states. As Douglass puts it in his famous speech, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July,” by the signing of the Fugitive Slave Law “Mason & Dixon’s line has been obliterated; New York has become as Virginia” (Douglass [1852] 1996b, 121). The law compelled northerners to assist in the recapture of formerly enslaved people, so after the law’s passage, no security could be found within the jurisdiction of the United States.

Revolts at sea by enslaved people in the literary imagination provide a distillation of the two contrasting positions present in the discussion at the 1850 and 1858 conventions—escape and revolt on ships, as opposed to on land, are complementary rather than contradictory elements of enfranchisement. On the one hand, a revolt by enslaved people resembles abolition through violent revolution, but on a small scale. In that sense, a revolt follows the ethical duty to fight against the institution of slavery to help others. Yet ships used to transport enslaved people necessarily exist within a transnational context, and the only permanently successful ship revolts end in expatriation. With this initial tension between intra and international struggle in mind, this essay will explore the ways in which two novellas about self-emancipations at sea, Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” contend with the complex politics of mobility.

The two stories emerge from similar political backgrounds. Events such as the Haitian Revolution, Nat Turner’s rebellion, and the Amistad revolt give the stories their urgency and psychic resonance. This essay breaks into two main parts and grapples with three interrelated topics. First, the essay considers the ship’s role in the context of mobility studies, arguing that the simultaneous presence of fluidity and sedentarism makes the ship an ideal focal point for contestations of mobility. Second, the essay considers the way ships themselves function in the two novellas as textual entities in themselves—as things characters must read, decode, and decipher. I ultimately suggest that ships used in the transportation of enslaved people present a screen onto which varying and opposing ideologies can be projected. Imprisonment and liberation, nationalism and transnationalism, and order and chaos all find their articulation in these narratives. These two novellas, as I will argue, make reading, deciphering, and controlling the ship into a political act.

The Ship as Contested Space

In his 2007 book Mobilities, John Urry describes a tendency in mobility theory that he calls “sedentarism,” a concept based in large part on Martin Heidegger’s notions of “dwelling,” meaning to “be content or at home within a place,” and on the imprinting of landscapes with paths of various kinds (Urry 2007, 31–32). Sedentarism considers the dynamic relationship between dwelling and landscape in which the mode of dwelling modifies the nature of the landscape and vice versa. On the other end of the spectrum one finds fluidity and nomadism. Rather than focus on place as stasis, or even landscape as an amalgamation of nature and human action, theorists of fluidity and nomadism consider movement to be central to being. The nomad exists without a state and wanders across spaces claimed by others, thus potentially challenging historically durable conceptions of place or nation.

The ship is at once sedentary and nomadic. Its architectural construction encapsulates the passenger in a highly localized area, yet this cramped, ordered space moves through expansive environments while changing them only minutely and temporarily.Footnote 2 Unlike a railroad or a highway, the bulk of the places through which a ship travels remain largely unchanged to the naked eye.Footnote 3 In his 2007 book The Slave Ship, Marcus Rediker finds in the slave ship itself a place where three systems of power developed to accommodate the necessities of the transatlantic slave trade. The slave ship serves as a warship, a factory, and a prison. The product of this “factory” is the enslaved people on board who were stored within the ship using methods that would later be implemented in the construction of prisons. The disciplinary control over the enslaved people was meant to produce them as goods for sale. Exercise, forced dancing, etc., were techniques to keep human cargo healthy and serviceable (Rediker 2007, 7). In short, the slave ship contains within it extraordinary motility for its proprietors, an ability of movement largely unconstrained by law or national sovereignty, but highly delimited and spatialized mechanisms of control for the enslaved.

These systems of power, given the limited size of a ship and the large number of enslaved people aboard, represent both the maintenance of control and the specter of its flip side, the self-emancipation of enslaved people, in which the very structural characteristics that make the ship a prison, factory, and warship hold out the possibility of empowering a revolting group. In short, the efficient tools of domination found on slave ships could, in the event of a revolt, give birth to a kind of rogue nation of enslaved people, complete with military power and an accompanying prison. The threat of revolt, then, resembles a threat of national revolution on a small scale. Literary representation of self-emancipation thus operates on multiple scales, both as representations of real or possible events, and as microcosms of national and transnational tensions.

Melville and the Machinery of Enslavement

Melville’s “Benito Cereno” thematizes all three of Rediker’s aforementioned functions. Based on a true event, the 1805 revolt aboard the Tryal, the story begins when a strange and ragged ship arrives at St. María Island, near Concepción, Chile. The ship, it seems, was on its way from Buenos Aires to Lima but hit heavy gales off Cape Horn. The voyage thus begins in the Atlantic and ends in the Pacific.Footnote 4 The protagonist, Amasa Delano, spends the bulk of the narrative wondering why the captain of this ship is acting so strangely and why he is always followed by a mysterious African sailor named Babo. If the story is a mystery, then Delano is a poor detective; he continually overlooks evidence that a revolt has taken place on the ship, a fact that is eventually exposed to Delano and to the reader. Benito Cereno, the deposed captain of the vessel, spends much of the text acting as a puppet, controlled by Babo, the revolt’s leader. Once the prior action aboard the ship is revealed, a battle ensues and captain Amasa Delano’s men take the ship; the revolting enslaved people are imprisoned or killed, and the survivors are tried in court. The next section of the story takes the form of a court deposition recorded from the testimony of Benito Cereno. The deposition is presented as the true story of the revolt—and though the narrator finds the contents of the deposition hard to believe, they appear to be the final story of what happened aboard the San Dominick, as the surviving Africans testify to the truth of what Benito Cereno has said. The text ends with a coda in which Babo is executed, and Benito Cereno confines himself to a monastery and dies shortly thereafter.

Much scholarship on “Benito Cereno” focuses on Amasa Delano’s misreading of the events aboard the San Dominick. Indeed, the narrative arc depends on Delano’s inability to see what is right in front of him. Peter Coviello claims that Delano is a sentimental reader and, like one among the throngs of fans of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he is blinded not only by racism, but also by his “winning ‘benevolence of heart’” (2002, 159). Moreover, what Delano is tasked with reading is, according to Coviello, a scene full of gothic tropes: from the monastery-like appearance of the ship as it arrives in the distance, to the skeleton attached to the mast-head. Delano compares Benito Cereno to a “hypochondriac abbot,” describes him as “rather tall, but seemed never to have been robust, and now with nervous suffering was almost worn to a skeleton” (Melville 1987, 52). And the ship itself enters the harbor “wimpled by […] low, creeping clouds, showed not unlike a Lima intriguante’s one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loophole of her dusk say-y-manta.” (47) This confluence of southern-European gothic tropes with Orientalism produces in both Delano and the reader a sense of intrigue and mysterious dread, but also gives the story a feeling of unreality. Coviello takes this setting and characterization to indicate that Melville is mocking not only Delano’s imperceptive reading, but the reader’s as well. Delano feels overwhelmed with clues, or as Greg Grandin puts it, “trapped by the superficialities of [his] own perception of the world” (Grandin 2013, 234).

Toni Morrison associates Delano’s lack of perception with his social position: “What he sees is what he is socialized to see: docile if disorderly blacks […] The American captain spends the day on board the San Dominick, happily observing, inquiring, chatting and arranging relief […] Any mild uneasiness he feels is quickly obliterated by his supreme confidence in his assessment of the order of things” (Morrison 1997, ix). This aspect of the text has been explored less thoroughly—the focus on what he can read properly: the ship’s characteristics, its physical flaws, mislaid ropes, and general lack of precision; when Delano tries to calm his unease by assessing the “order of things,” in fact he finds disorder. Bill Brown’s “thing theory” suggests “we begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested” (Brown 2001, 4). The logic of “Benito Cereno” functions in just this way. Captain Delano experiences the “thingness” of many items on the ship as he apprehends their deviation from the standard order.

Delano trains his focus on the many things missing from the ship: its flag, guns, and lifeboats. First to catch his eye is the ship’s missing flag: “[t]o Captain Delano’s surprise, the stranger, viewed through the glass, showed no colors” (Melville 1987, 46). The lack of lifeboats, additionally, causes Delano to question Don Benito:

“Had you three or four boats now, Don Benito,” said Captain Delano, “I think that, by tugging at the oars, your negroes here might help along matters some. Did you sail from port without boats, Don Benito?” “They were stove in the gales, Señor.” “That was bad. Many men, too, you lost then. Boats and men. Those must have been hard gales, Don Benito.” “Past all speech,” cringed the Spaniard. (81)

In addition to the ship’s lack of a flag and lifeboats, its martial capacity appears diminished to Delano: “in the business in which she was engaged, the ship’s general model and rig appeared to have undergone no material change from their original warlike and Froissart pattern. However, no guns were seen” (81). Ships used in the transatlantic slave trade were not merely modified merchant ships but functioned also as military vessels. As such, the lack of visible guns strikes Delano as odd. Delano proves to be capable of spotting the crucial elements missing from the ship, yet he lacks the ability to contextualize his reading.

In addition to the missing items, Delano notices the many aspects of the ship that have fallen into disrepair. The ship’s “spars, ropes, and great part of the bulwarks looked woolly from long unacquaintance with the scraper, tar, and the brush” (48). The description continues:

The tops were large, and were railed about with what had once been octagonal network, all now in sad disrepair […] battered and moldy, the castellated forecastle seemed some ancient turret long ago taken by assault […] toward the stern, two high-raised quarter galleries–the balustrades here and there covered with dry tindery sea moss–opening out from the unoccupied state-cabin, whose dead lights, for all the mild weather, were hermetically closed and caulked–these tenantless balconies hung over the sea as if it were the grand Venetian canal. (48–49)

More than simply taking note of these issues, Delano slips into fanciful descriptions. Dry observations of rigging, sails, and forecastles turn into imaginings of an “ancient turret” and a “Venetian canal.” It is in these passages that Delano’s romantic imagination intersects with his technical observations. Throughout the story, Delano comments on the major and minor flaws in both the ship’s condition and the lack of discipline of its sailors, many of whom he still perceives to be enslaved. There is a subtle humor to the way he wanders the deck like a drill sergeant, pointing out the many flaws in the rigging while the people whom he takes for enslaved Africans sit polishing their knives. Delano takes on a role as a part of the ship’s power structure through the practice of his care for technical proficiency. In pointing out and questioning the ship’s physical inadequacies, Delano seeks to reestablish an ordered state which would guarantee the ship’s ability to carry out its goal of transporting enslaved people.

In these descriptions of a ship in disrepair, it is not entirely clear whether the narrator or Delano himself is making the observation, though Delano’s fixation on the “thingness” of the ship’s attributes continues beyond narration and into dialogue, thus suggesting that it is Delano whose attention is drawn by the disorder. The narrator shifts the lens to expose the uncanny nature of the ship’s disorder; a space normally governed by precise command and discipline appears gothic when it slips into disrepair. As the narrator intrudes on Delano’s interpretation, the metaphorical conception of the ship turns from that of a gothic novel to an Orientalist landscape marked by desert, forest, and jungle. The one remaining boat aboard is an

unseaworthy old hulk of [a] longboat, which, warped as a camel’s skeleton in the desert and almost as bleached, lay pot-wise inverted amidships, one side a little tipped, furnishing a subterraneous sort of den for family groups of the blacks, mostly women and children, who, squatting on old mats below, or perched above in the dark dome on the elevated seats, were descried, some distance within, like a social circle of bats sheltering in some friendly cave. (81)

This image is a bit tortured. The incongruous mixture of a camel’s skeleton in the desert with a bat cave, dry and bright mixed with damp and dark, suggests that the narrator is at a loss to describe the scene, but again his imagination has left the immediate surroundings. Read as free indirect discourse, this scene reflects Delano’s wild associations and ornate Orientalist tendencies. Another such image follows from a description of the mangled rope and rigging:

Groves of rigging were about the chains; and there, peering from behind a great stay, like an Indian from behind a hemlock, a Spanish sailor, a marlingspike in his hand, was seen, who made what seemed an imperfect gesture towards the balcony, but immediately, as if alarmed by some advancing step along the deck within, vanished into the recesses of the hempen forest like a poacher. (74)

Again, the narrative voice begins from an image of disorder in the materiality of the ship and then shifts to fancy, casting the Spanish sailor in the role of a poacher, his marlingspike transformed into a gun. The narrative voice then indicates that the above indeed is Delano’s own fancy “What meant this? Something the man had sought to communicate, unbeknown to any one, even the captain. […] Were those previous misgivings of Captain Delano’s about to be verified? Or, in his haunted mood at the moment, had some random, unintentional motion of the man, while busy with the stay as if repairing it, been mistaken for a significant beckoning?” (74–75). Melville uses the narrator’s ambiguity to place the reader somewhere near yet outside of Delano’s consciousness.

We find ourselves taking free indirect discourse for omniscient voice, and vice versa, until the separation between simple description and fanciful interpretation becomes blurred. The knowledge Amasa Delano relies on is akin to linguistic and grammatical structure. His vision is disrupted by the way the ship is stripped of its standard social order, made strange, disturbing, and finally illegible. Delano’s “reading” of the ship ironically both blinds him to the larger story and alerts him to the way power, as it is written into the physicality of the ship, has begun to come undone. Melville’s story, I have been arguing, is ultimately a meditation on order and the way objects and things are mediated by narrative and language. More importantly, though, when read against the grain, the story exposes the ways in which slavery, violence, and the governance of oceanic spaces are enforced by legal systems that afford rights to some and not to others, and by technocratic captains, whose devotion to orderliness on ship allows for the perpetuation of oppression.Footnote 5 I agree with Greg Grandin’s assessment that Delano “represents a […] common form of modern authority. His power is based not on the demagogic pull of charisma but on the everyday pressures involved in controlling labor and converting diminishing natural resources into marketable items” (Grandin 2013, 235). Delano’s good-natured support of the global slave trade is a banal evil.

If we, as readers, have been duped along with Delano, and the text perpetuates a conspiracy of sorts, then should we view the final description of the events, mediated through abridged legal documents, as legitimate? Marta Puxan-Oliva suggests that two parts of the authority of the legal documents at the end of the story should be called into question: first because there is little physical evidence to corroborate the story, and second, the testimony of enslaved witnesses is not heard, aside from “probably distorted hearsay” (Puxan-Oliva 2018, 435).Footnote 6 Though the narrative treats the legal document as conclusive, it too is the product of a necessarily distorted system, distorted at least by its lack of universal inclusion of witnesses, but also by its status as a partial and translated text. The story’s turn toward “official” legal description of the events aboard the ship ought also to be understood in the context of Delano’s reading and misreading.Footnote 7

Madison Washington’s Nautical Literacy

Frederick Douglass’s novella “The Heroic Slave,” like Melville’s text, dramatizes a slave revolt at sea, and similarly focuses on the material conditions of the ship to establish its metaphorical conception of power. The factual events that Douglass uses as the source material for the novella occur nearly a decade before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, but when Douglass publishes the novella in 1852, the law certainly must have been on the minds of his readers, and the connection between law and geography had become, more than ever, a matter of life and death for formerly enslaved people. “The Heroic Slave” is a fictionalization of the life of Madison Washington, the leader of a revolt aboard the Creole in which 19 of the ship’s 135 enslaved people revolt, take control of the ship, and force the crew to sail to Nassau, the capital of the British-owned Bahamas. There the British authorities quickly free the individuals who had not participated in the mutiny, and after a few months, the mutineers themselves are also freed (Levine et al. 2015, ix). The revolt, with just three deaths and well over one hundred emancipations of enslaved people, was “one of the most successful slave revolts in North America” (ix). Douglass’s fictionalized version of the event focuses on the life of its leader. The revolt itself is related in an after-the-fact dialogue between two white sailors.

In addition to making use of tropes and techniques common to nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, such as quotations from poetry, biblical allusion, and pathos-laden soliloquies, the narrative prose that comprises most of the text shifts at times to drama. In addition, the focalization of the narrator shifts from section to section. The effect of these experimental elements is that the text appears decentered. It is not the tale of just one person or just one narrator; it is stitched together from fact and from fiction.Footnote 8 The novella begins with a pointed description of the state of Virginia’s long history of producing great heroes and statesmen (such as the enslaver Thomas Jefferson) next to whom the reader is led to place Madison Washington.Footnote 9 The story follows Madison Washington as he escapes from slavery after several attempts, navigating his way through hardships from Virginia to Canada with the help of the North Star and the white Ohioan Mr. Listwell. It ends with a dialogue between two sailors about the revolt aboard the Creole; one sailor boasts of how he would have handled the revolt, and the other, who was present, testifies to Madison Washington’s greatness, mercy, and benevolence. The third-person narrator centers on the perspective of Listwell, a northern abolitionist stock figure who “listens well” and is quick to “enlist” in the cause of abolitionism, as his name doubly suggests.Footnote 10

The commentaries on “The Heroic Slave” have long focused on the role of spatial organization through state, national, and oceanic boundaries.Footnote 11 Though the story indeed highlights the sea as a space in which nature and human determination conspire to liberate the enslaved people on the ship, it is nevertheless true that their freedom would be only temporary. In order to gain lasting freedom, the enslaved people of the Creole must continue on to Nassau and secure protection by the English government. The Atlantic may not be so free after all, and Douglass, writing in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Law’s passage, must have been acutely aware that, as Ivy Wilson puts it, “[a]lthough oceans are liminal spaces among nations and seem to have no state jurisdiction, they are far from neutral territories” (2006, 464).

The narrative grapples most thoroughly with the complexity of practical and legal mobility during the conversation between the two white sailors. The men argue about whether enslaved people hold more power in maritime spaces than they do on land where “the whole physical force of the government, State and National [is] at your command” (Douglass 2015, 43). Madison Washington exclaims after he takes the helm of the ship, “you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free” (50). Yet, as Carrie Hyde points out, “on the juridical level, ships are essentially mobile extensions of the nation” despite the fact that the ship is “the quintessential icon of transatlantic unboundedness” (2013, 478). Liberation at sea thus only translates into permanent liberation if it leads to the jurisdiction of a country in which slavery is illegal.

Despite the fact that the sea cannot be understood as a locus of pure freedom, “The Heroic Slave,” like other texts in Douglass’s oeuvre, celebrates the ship and maritime life. Like Melville, Douglass is no stranger to nautical life and its complex vocabularies. As an enslaved teenager, he worked as a caulker in Baltimore. The ships in the Chesapeake Bay left a strong impression on him, as is made clear in the following passage:

I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships:—‘You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly round the world; I am confined in bands of iron! O that I were free! O, that I were on one of your gallant decks, and under your protecting wing!’ (Douglass [1845] 1996a, 64)

This passage, with its alliteration, apostrophe, and parallelism, is as lofty as any of Douglass’s speeches. His notion of the ships as objects of beauty as well as sites of freedom also appears in “The Heroic Slave.” “Soon the broad fore topsail, the royal and top gallant sail were spread to the breeze. Round went the heavy windlass, clank, clank went the fall-bit,–the anchors weighed,–jibs, mainsails, and topsails hauled to the wind, and the long, low, slack slaver, with her cargo of human flesh, careened and moved forward to the sea” (Douglass 2015, 40). Though the purpose of the ship in the above description is to transport enslaved people in order to steal their labor, Douglass nevertheless imbues it with a sense of beauty, or at least an aesthetic dimension. The logic and precision of the sails, anchors, and rigging testify to the value of technical efficiency and elegant design. Like Delano, Douglass blends specific and practical knowledge of a ship’s materiality with external ideas and fancies which remain separate from a ship’s actual purpose.

During the mutiny, in Douglass’s rendering, the space of the ship takes on a terrestrial quality. An ironic mirror image of an earlier scene in which Madison Washington evades potential capture by sitting in the branches of a tree occurs when the crew of the Creole hides up in the rigging of the ship, clinging “like so many frightened monkeys” (49). This image completes the reversal of position implicit in the revolt. Madison Washington, once forced to hide in a tree, now becomes the hunter, forcing his former captors to hide. The white sailors “like so many frightened monkeys” become associated with animals. The ship becomes a piece of land—the rigging becomes tree branches. These terrestrial images work to transform the ship into a clear inversion of the situation on land, and thus for that moment at least, the revolution is complete.

To the surprise of the captain, as well as the reader, Madison Washington has the ability to navigate and sail the ship expertly. The only knowledge the reader has of any nautical experience in Washington’s past is his trip across Lake Erie to Canada, and that was on a steamer, not a sailboat. Nevertheless, he exhibits mastery of sailing: “During the storm, Madison stood firmly at the helm,—his keen eye fixed upon the binnacle. He was not indifferent to the dreadful hurricane; yet he met it with the equanimity of an old sailor” (50). Like Washington’s eloquence, “his words were well chosen, and his pronunciation equal to that of any schoolmaster,” the origin of his prowess as a seaman is not to be found in the text (47). He is heroic and exceptional. This aspect of Douglass’s story, the superhuman, hyper-masculine heroism of Madison Washington, has been criticized gently by Richard Yarborough (1990, 166–188) and more forcefully by Krista Walter (2000, 233–245). Carrie Hyde sidesteps this critique by pointing out the way in which Washington’s movements through the geographical spaces of the plot are often determined by nature: a fire, a rainstorm, a squall, and not solely by his own talent. Nevertheless, Washington literally speaks the language of the oppressor, and is therefore a poor model of resistance for some critics. But for Douglass, language is a skill like piloting a ship. His first autobiography thematizes the close connection between literacy and freedom, and Madison Washington’s story is much the same, though his acquisition of skills, such as seamanship and rhetoric, do not occur within the text, they mirror Douglass’s own coming of age and achievement of freedom. In a sense, then, “The Heroic Slave” is a literacy narrative, but rather than learning to read texts, as Douglass does in his own life, the protagonist reads stars, telltales, and binnacles.

Conclusions: New Mobilities and Life After Social Death

Gesa Mackenthun’s observation that “Benito Cereno” employs a “particular juxtaposition of different times and geographical spaces [that] violates and subverts the normal order of history and narrative” (2004, 143) can also be applied to “The Heroic Slave.” Both texts redraw the boundaries connecting narration to geography, and use the ship, with its literal as well as metaphorical mobilities, not to romanticize mobility as such, but to challenge nationalistic ideology either by exposing it or by rewriting it.

In a reading of “Benito Cereno,” Christopher Freeburg applies Bill Brown’s “thing theory” to the apparently enslaved Africans aboard the ship. Freeburg points out “when the slave […] stops working as the slave, as merely an extension of his master’s wishes, and rejects this condition only to perform it as an act, the slave shifts from a thing of property […] to a thing of contingency to the master” (2012, 110). Freeburg’s line of argumentation seeks to complicate Orlando Patterson’s notion of “social death,” the condition of total powerlessness for the enslaved that results from a “master/slave” relationship (see Patterson 1982). From Freeburg’s perspective, Delano’s blindness to the events aboard the ship stems from his inability to imagine life after social death (100). Madison Washington’s nautical literacy similarly stands as a counterpoint to social death, and the sailors surprised by it in the narrative, like Delano, are incapable of imaging an enslaved person as anything other than completely dominated. Freeburg emphasizes that “one can never eliminate the possibility of another Nat Turner, Toussaint Overture, Frederick Douglass, or Harriet Jacobs […] because humans cannot permanently master social life” (2012, 129). Babo and Madison Washington, despite their drastically different ends, could both be added to this list.