2022-23 Academic Catalog

From its famous opening line to its apocalyptic close, Melville’s lofty and profane romance of the whaling-industry is gripped by the myths and marked by the traumas of race. Exploring its black-and-white thematics and racialized characters in nineteenth- as well as twenty-first-century social and political contexts, this course takes Melville’s stupendous book as an anatomy of "whiteness" as a racial construct in U.S. cultural history.