What Is the White American? Race, Emigration, and Nation in Melville's Redburn

Abstract:The essay argues that Melville's fourth novel, Redburn (1849), is one of the great nineteenth-century works about race and emigration, and a work that looks forward in prescient ways to our current debate about emigrants and a border wall. The focus is on Melville's depiction of Irish emigrants, who are presented both as refugees and as Celts who are less "white" than the Anglo-Saxons. Melville thus links the Irish analogously to blacks and (at times) to slaves. Drawing on recent work on refugee studies by Agamben and others, and on slavery and whiteness studies, the essay situates Melville's transatlantic novel in relation to mid-19th-century debates in England and the US on the displaced, stateless Irish of the Great Famine. For its trenchant account of the limits and even brutality of the white US nation, Redburn is the Melville novel we should be reading right now.