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The politics of perception in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno and Charles Johnson's Middle Passage.

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From: Studies in American Fiction
Date: 20050922
Author:Valkeakari, Tuire

Perception is no neutral cognitive event, no unmediated transmission of external reality to the individual human mind. Much lies in the eye of the beholder, as, for example, scholars who analyze and interrogate the malleable social construct of "race" very well know. Perception involves interpretation, an attribution of meaning that is in dialogue with (and often rather uncritically stems from) the information, values, and categories of thought that already inhabit the perceiver's mind prior to a given instance of perception. In addition to scholars, many fiction writers have ...

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