This session considers how writers and artists outside the United States have read and responded to Herman Melville’s works, particularly in the twentieth-century geopolitical contexts of totalitarianism, the Cold War, migration, and exile. The shared thesis of all the papers included in this session is that readers of Melville outside the United States have provided novel and unorthodox interpretations of his work that have facilitated the "global" or "transnational" turn in Melville Studies. The session will contribute to and extend the scholarship of this turn by pairing figures whose readings of Melville have long been recognized as unique and influential, such as Cesare Pavese and C. L. R. James, with the readings of more recent figures such as British-Zanzibari writer (and Nobel Laureate) Abdulrazak Gurnah and British-Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah.

Pilar Martínez Benedí will discuss the Italian writer Cesare Pavese’s 1932 translation of Moby-Dick in the context of his militant anti-fascism, linking Pavese’s poetics with his politics. Donald Pease will discuss his new 2025 re-edition of C. L. R. James’s radical reinterpretation of Melville’s work in his 1953 study Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In, which resisted the nationalist readings of Melville that predominated in Cold War Americanist scholarship and thus anticipated, by several decades, the global and transnational turns in Melville scholarship. Esther Pujolràs Noguer will consider British-Zanzibari writer Abdulrazak Gurnah’s re-reading of Bartleby as a refugee figure in his 2001 novel By the Sea. And Nicholas Spengler will propose a dialogue between Gurnah’s By the Sea and British-Ghanaian filmmaker John Akomfrah’s 2015 installation Vertigo Sea in terms of their use of Melville to reflect on the politics of the Cold War, refugee crises, and transoceanic migrations.

This session will mark the beginning of a conversation and collaboration on “Melville and the Geopolitics of Reading” that we hope will lead to a collective volume of essays, including contributions from roughly a dozen scholars from across the globe.

Presenters will ensure that the duration of papers is 15-17 minutes to allow for roughly 20 minutes of unstructured discussion.

The selection of panelists represents gender balance and a diversity of nationalities, as well as a range of scholars at different stages of their academic careers.