We are happy to share that Dr Nicholas Spengler participated in the MLA 2026 Convention. At the invitation of the Melville Society, Dr Spengler organised the panel “Melville and the Geopolitics of Reading,” focusing on Melville’s literary reception in the Global South during the Cold War. Against the nationalist readings of Melville that predominated in Cold War Americanist scholarship, and against the US government’s instrumentalisation of Melville and other canonical American writers as a “soft power” tool to promote US ideology, readers and writers outside the United States found in Melville’s work a resource for articulating their own experiences as marginalised subjects in a world shaped by colonialism, capitalism, and the armed conflicts precipitated by both. Against the backdrop of exile and migration, these readers have used Melville’s writing to reflect on the long-term effects and legacies of war, colonialism, and capitalism.
Donald Pease, the leading “New Americanist” scholar based at Dartmouth College, opened the panel by discussing his 2025 critical re‑edition of Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In, C. L. R. James’s radical reinterpretation of Melville’s work. Pease’s first critical edition of James’s book appeared in 2000, and the 2025 re‑edition renews and celebrates the scholarly attention that James’s once‑obscure text has attracted thanks to Pease’s sustained engagement. James’s vision of Herman Melville and the World We Live In is shaped by his experience as a leftist intellectual from Trinidad and as a migrant in the United States who resisted deportation. Written during his detention on Ellis Island in 1952, James’s Melville book was both a plea for US citizenship and an idiosyncratic yet incisive interpretation of Melville’s work as a warning about the rise of totalitarianism—not as a foreign threat, but as an internal development emerging from US democracy itself. In this way, James resisted the Cold War geopolitics that had placed him in detention as a migrant and suspected Communist. His reading of Melville was thus transgressive, challenging the chauvinist and nationalist interpretations of the time and attuning Melville’s work to the global violence produced by capitalist and colonialist structures of power.
Next, Nicholas Spengler discussed two works that consider Melville from the perspective of the castaway, the exile, the migrant, and the refugee: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel By the Sea (2001) and John Akomfrah’s film installation Vertigo Sea (2025). By the Sea traces the intertwined lives of two refugees fleeing the violence of the Zanzibar Revolution who seek asylum in the UK and who share a deep attachment to Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Bartleby becomes both a figure for their precarious status as refugees and a point of connection that allows them to resist Bartleby’s solitary fate. Vertigo Sea is a masterful audiovisual collage that juxtaposes still and moving images across three screens with sounds and texts drawn from a wide range of sources. The work offers a planetary vision of the sea as a space of human and nonhuman migration, conveying both its ecological richness and its complex, violent histories of navigation, trade, colonialism, capitalism, and war. Drawing on the concepts of “decolonial ecology” (Malcolm Ferdinand) and “environmental postmemory,” Spengler argued that Gurnah and Akomfrah present nonhuman objects and agents as lieux de mémoire through which to narrate histories of violence that extend beyond direct survivors and their immediate descendants, producing long-term and diffuse effects across both human and nonhuman worlds.
Finally, Leyli Jamali, an independent scholar formerly affiliated with Azad University of Tabriz, discussed her book project-in-progress, which takes Herman Melville as its point/port of departure to decipher the historical metanarratives and sociopolitical frameworks that have shaped the project of modernity in Iran. Jamali combines her research on Melville’s reception in Iran from the Cold War to the present with her own story of exile and displacement, tracing how interest in Melville’s work across this period has often converged with political movements and activism. Using Melville as a historical gateway, Jamali approaches this unique geopolitical zone to investigate how its ongoing process of modernisation is locked in a historical middle ground, taking place between ends and beginnings that never truly actualise, always dangling at the verge of happening, which she argues is the reason behind the ideological/political suspension that is experienced in present-day Iran. New movements have evoked new readings, and Melville has played his share in the resistance, in particular through readings of “Bartleby” and Billy Budd.