Benito Cereno Questions:
Discuss Captain Delano’s attitudes towards the Black crew.
Compare and contrast Phillips vs. Melville in terms of how
African Americans are depicted.
Focus on the ways that women are depicted in Cambridge
vs. Benito Cereno.
Characters, Atufal, Babo, Cereno. How does Melville
build their characters throughout the novel?
Themes to think through in Benito Cereno:
Slavery and freedom
whiteness
the possibility of rebellion (suicidal or a real possibility?)
Performance versus reality. (In a slave society, is authentic
living possible?)
Morality of slavery?
Racism in 1856
Civil War would start only five years after the novel was written!
Is Benito Cereno an anti-slavery book? If so, how does it compare
with contemporary anti-slavery novels such as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin”?
Would it be possible to take these novels and create a new
history of the African Diaspora and or a new way to write
studies of slavery?
BIG THEMES
What do books like Cambridge and Benito Cereno have to
teach us about the human condition?
About the connections between slavery, freedom, and emancipation?
Discussion Questions for week of April 4th
Here are some reading/discussion questions for the Phillips reading:
Choose one of the major characters of the novel and describe their major personality characteristics, life history, motivations (what makes them act they way that they act?)
How does Phillips depict plantation slavery? Such as, the day to day relationships between enslaved Africans and overseers? African culture on the plantation?
Discuss the intellectual evolution of the daughter of the absentee plantation owner. She starts the novel as a person opposed to slavery. How do her ideas about slavery change as she encounters enslaved Africans?
Religion, its role in the story.
Cambridge, the character.
Describe the plantation at the outset and be able to describe the "myth and the reality" of the plantation. In other words, discuss the differences between "appearances" and "realities" of slave plantation life.
What appears to have been the overarching purpose for writing this novel?
As you transition to Melville, the disjuncture between appearance and reality in the Transatlantic slavery system only becomes more pronounced!
Choose one of the major characters of the novel and describe their major personality characteristics, life history, motivations (what makes them act they way that they act?)
How does Phillips depict plantation slavery? Such as, the day to day relationships between enslaved Africans and overseers? African culture on the plantation?
Discuss the intellectual evolution of the daughter of the absentee plantation owner. She starts the novel as a person opposed to slavery. How do her ideas about slavery change as she encounters enslaved Africans?
Religion, its role in the story.
Cambridge, the character.
Describe the plantation at the outset and be able to describe the "myth and the reality" of the plantation. In other words, discuss the differences between "appearances" and "realities" of slave plantation life.
What appears to have been the overarching purpose for writing this novel?
As you transition to Melville, the disjuncture between appearance and reality in the Transatlantic slavery system only becomes more pronounced!
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