The Prosthetic Arts of Moby-Dick

Reviews / Votes

Beginning with Ahab's wounding and limb loss, David Blake weaves together a disability aesthetics running through Moby-Dick and shedding light on American democracy itself: its identity inseparable from its vulnerability, its power inseparable from its projection of violence onto Islamic cultures. A must-read for Melville scholars, and for anyone interested in American literature. * Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University * Reflecting on the vulnerabilities of Captain Ahab, the iconic disabled figure in American literature, Blake offers a bracing reading of Moby-Dick. From his ivory leg to his bosom friend the Parsee Fedallah, Ahab relies on a set of assistive devices, or prostheses, that grant him a relational sense of being in the world. Though vengeful and destructive at last, Ahab's journey has defied ableism in both its antebellum and our contemporary iterations, and by so doing inspires us to revisit the novel, and the body politic it embodies, from the vantage point of the human and non-human, organic and inorganic, prostheses that animate the narrative. The book meets us at the intersection of disability justice and democratic reform; and as it transcends Ahab's mastery, the book envisions new ways of being and becoming with the Other within and beyond the US. * Amir Vafa, Shariz University * Blake's book ably appraises Melville's meditations on the value of psychological and racial aggrievement in the expression of American authoritarian power. It charts how Melville rendered the 'thump' of traumatic dismemberment into a prosthetic matrix for incorporating others into the violent extension of individual retribution and national power. The powerful readings of Fedallah and his mysterious gazes reembody him into a crucial prosthesis for Ahab, but also a phantom narrator for Ishmael and Melville, in ways that pilot new insights into how Moby-Dick remains premised on geo-political dispossession of Asians and Muslims. Blake's timely analysis of Melville's mediations of mutilated bodies makes this book a prophecy for readers to remember in today's vindictive times. * Timothy Marr, University of North Carolina *