This panel seeks to interrogate the politics, aesthetics, and ethics of borders in Herman Melville’s oeuvre and, in doing so, decenters Melville from a trans-American and hemispheric genealogy of migration, immigration, and citizenship. In doing so, we put pressure not only on nationalist assumptions of borders but also the conceptual borders the separate the human from the non-human as well as the disciplinary borders – especially those that fall along racial, ethnic, and linguistic lines - that have traditionally organized Melville scholarship.

At thirty years, the “transnational turn” in American studies is perhaps still the most influential paradigm in critical approaches to Melville. Melville scholarship now encompasses scales that are simultaneously more vast and more local than traditional nationalist approaches: from the hemispheric to the Black Atlantic to the trans-Pacific; from the planetary, the cosmopolitan, and the global to the archipelagic, the Indigenous, and the regional. As important interventions by Donald Pease, Wai Chee Dimock, Amy Kaplan, Birgit Brander Rasmussen, and Rodrigo Lazo have shown, Melville’s oeuvre demands methodologies that refuse the nation-state as a base unit of analysis. And yet many recent attempts to nuance a transnational framework have reproduced the violence embedded in nationalist ideologies. To what extent, this panel asks, have critics naturalized the coterminous borders of the human and the citizen central to racist imperialist projects? Following recent interventions in Melville’s philosophy of personhood (see, for example, Branka Arsic, Michael Jonik, and Jeanne Marie DeLombard), this panel reconsiders definitions of the human, while also opening up these posthuman genealogies to theories of personhood traditionally overlooked in Melville studies, from Afro-Caribbean spirituality to Sylvia Wynter.

The papers on this panel take Melville as a point of departure, albeit an unstable one whose central role in narratives of “American” literature is constantly debated and redefined. Dr. Kayla Hardy-Butler, for example, begins by tracing Melville’s influence on the Black radical tradition in her paper entitled “Black Feminist Futures.” While critics often recognize genealogies of masculine, Anglophone Black interventions in Melville – from Ralph Ellison to C.L.R James – Hardy-Butler traces an alternative multilingual Black women’s genealogy beginning with femmes de couleur in 19^th century francophone Louisiana and moving towards modern and contemporary engagements with Melville in the work of Hortense Spillers, Wanda Coleman and Alexis Pauline Gumbs.

Dr. Alyson Brickey and Dr. Dana Medoro continue to interrogate white appropriations of Black knowledge in their co-authored paper “Bartleby, Refugee.” By examining Melville’s Bartleby as a fungible figure of racial crossing and white supremacist fantasy, they argue Bartleby’s ostensibly fixed immovability instead gives way to an ethics of fugitivity, one which is active, migratory, and ultimately unsettles the logics of racial capitalism.

Like Bartleby, whose migrations refuse to be assimilated into white supremacist forms of labor, Babo of “Benito Cereno” (1855) refuses normative conceptions of citizenship. In “Law and Legibility in Benito Cereno,” Rohan Ghotage reads Babo as a failure to reconstruct the category of the US citizen. Instead, Babo brings into view possibilities that inhere in the alien subject, which exist precisely because they reside outside of the space of (global northern sanctioned) systems of knowledge production. Echoing Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Babo’s “alien” refusal to speak mirrors the “illegibility” of the Haitian Revolution.

The panel concludes with Jaime Campomar, whose paper "Israel Ramírez/Alonso Potter” expands the parameters of Anglophone Americanist scholarship. By tracing the connections between Israel Potter (1854) and don Carlos Sigüenza y Góngora’s Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez (1690) Campomar puts pressure on strategies of chronological, linguistic, and geographical gate keeping. As contemporary immigration discourse has focused on the raced demarcation of the human/non-human border (for example, the dehumanizing rhetoric of “surges” and “waves” at the U.S-Mexico border), this paper asks what it would mean to decenter the human from nationalist narratives. What can Hispanophone approaches to “Americanist” scholarship tell critics about their own (raced and gendered) assumptions, methodological limitations, and ethical blind spots?

Spanning from 17^th-century Mexico to the 18^th-century Haitian Revolution, to 19^th-century francophone Louisiana to a present day that looks towards Black feminist potentialities, this panel unsettles the centrality of white, Anglophone narratives from Melville studies, puts pressure on linguistic, disciplinary, and national borders and, in doing so, traces new critical genealogies.