Jan D. Kucharzewski

“I’m the Captain Now”: Hegemony and Liminality in Benito Cereno and Captain Phillips 

This paper reads Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno (1855) and Paul Greengrass’ film Captain Phillips (2013) as comparable manifestations of hegemonic anxieties.
Separated by more than 150 years, both texts dramatize episodes of inversion in (post)colonial maritime history: Benito Cereno provides a fictionalized account of the mutiny on a Spanish slave ship in 1805 and Captain Phillips is based on the hijacking of the container ship Maersk Alabama by Somalian pirates in 2009. In both narratives, the authority of the captain as a representative of hegemonic power is challenged but, so the central claim of this paper ultimately reaffirmed.
Whereas postcolonial critical discourses often conceptualize oceanic and nautical spheres as “heterotopias” in which, according to Foucault, hegemonic power is “simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted,” sea stories like Benito Cereno and Captain Phillips predominantly cater to a fantasy of asserting authority over the ever-changing.
This tension between heterotopic possibilities and hegemonic anxieties is especially accentuated in nautical narratives of mutiny and piracy. Since ships are already precarious constructions of stability in a permanently fluid environment, acts of mutiny and piracy — especially when committed by subaltern subjectivities — metaphorically (and sometimes literally) level the epistemic separation of ship and sea by liquefying the nautical social sphere. Therefore, hegemonic narrativizations of mutinies and piracy strive to impose linearity and causality onto oceanic and cultural topographies which resist such efforts.
In order to demonstrate how Benito Cereno and Captain Phillips deploy strikingly similar strategies for resolving the paradoxes of colonial (Benito Cereno) and globalized (Captain Phillips) entanglements, the paper applies the anthropological concept of liminality as initially coined by Arnold van Gennep (1909) to the materials. Unlike postcolonial notions of in-betweenness such as Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ or Homi Bhabha’s ‘third space,’ liminality functions as a mechanism by which socially restricted behaviors regarding, for example, hierarchy and authority can be indulged but also contained within a prevailing system. As such, liminality is a powerful device for maintaining hegemony: The liminal encourages oppositional impulses, only to symbolically subdue and purge them.
By reading Benito Cereno and Captain Phillips as texts of (post)colonial and oceanic liminalities, this paper explores the possibilities and limits of narrating geographic and social fluidity in American sea stories.