Manufacturing Belief: Religion, Slavery, and Benito Cereno

Abstract Although not typically read as either a religious text or a narrative preoccupied with religious issues, Herman Melville’s novella of maritime slave revolution and recontainment demonstrates how antebellum Americans came to “believe” in slavery. Focusing on the narrative’s staging of religious declension within the theater of enslavement aboard the San Dominick, this essay shows how the novella positions the practice of human slavery as an object of belief and obligation, thereby rendering human slavery into a coherent feature of the national landscape.