Amasa Delano, o dell’impensabilità della rivoluzione nera

Herman Melville’s novella “Benito Cereno”, as many readers have pointed out, makes explicit reference to the Haitian Revolution, showing its centrality to the history and cultural imaginary of the United States. Based on the events narrated by Amasa Delano in his 1817 memoir, “Benito Cereno” changes the original text in ways that reframe it as a revisionist history of the Haitian Revolution where the United States sea captain successfully crushes the rebellious slaves’ fight for freedom. Not only does Melville’s work highlight the United States’ complex relationship with the other American Revolution; in its protagonist’s refusal to see the rebellion as a claiming of the right to liberty on the part of the enslaved Africans, it also exemplifies the tropes of erasure and trivialization through which, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in Silencing the Past, Western modernity has turned the Haitian Revolution into an unthinkable event.