Social Construction of Race and Reality

Herman Melville's Benito Cereno is a story of race relations and a narrative of racial formation. The theories and definitions set out by Michael Omi and Howard Winant in their article "Racial Formation in the United States" can easily be applied to Melville's novel. First, Benito Cereno details a slave revolt aboard a Spanish merchant ship off the coast of South America. The historical, political, economical, and social settings of Benito Cereno are at the root of the problems that Omi and Winant delineate. Indeed, the authors note on page 61 "It was only when European explorers reached the Western Hemisphere...that the distinctions and categorizations fundamental to a racialized social structure, and to a discourse of race, began to appear." In "discovering" new faces and races, the European explorers were suddenly faced with a paradigm threat. On the one hand, cultural and religious ideals...
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