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 Iranian scholar, examined Melville’s reception in Iran in relation to US influence in her home country during the Cold War. Jamali argued that the Iranian Revolution of 1979 was shaped in part by the political energy generated by theatrical adaptations and stagings of Melville’s Billy Budd in Iran during the 1960s and 1970s. She also recounted how her research on Melville and her collaboration with the Melville Society prompted the current Iranian government to accuse her of espionage and terminate her academic position at the University of Tehran. She is now working as an ESL instructor in Kingston, Ontario, and developing a book project that blends memoir and critical study, reading Melville through her own position as a refugee and “castaway.”