SOURCE: “Voicing Slavery Through Silence: Narrative Mutiny in Melville's Benito Cereno,” in Mosaic, Vol. 26, No. 2, Spring, 1993, pp. 21-38.

In the following essay, Haegert studies the complex narrative structure of “Benito Cereno” and its relation to the work as anti-imperialist fiction.

If anything can be said to dominate our cultural and historical preoccupations of recent years, it is the need for greater reticence and restraint in portraying the “alien” life of others. This pervasive concern with reticence—with the need to listen to rather than to speak for the cultural experience of other peoples—has become a staple feature of such diverse and influential studies as Edward Said's Orientalism, Clifford Geertz's The Interpretation of Cultures, Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish, Christopher Miller's Blank Darkness and Hayden White's The Content of the Form. In countering our inherited (and largely Eurocentric) notions of the East, for example, Said argues that our...