ABSTRACT

In “The Rope” (1993) Angela Davis describes how, while “anchored” in her “various communities,” she feels that the “rope attached to that anchor should be long enough to allow” her to “move into other communities to understand and learn.” Seeking to avoid the cycles of violence that began with “colonialist” divisions of the world into “firm biological” communities, she has been “thinking a lot about the need to make more intimate those connections and associations and to really take on the responsibility of learning” (Davis 1993: 31-2). To readers of Herman Melville, whose problematic legacy in Oceania will feature prominently in this book, Davis’s metaphorical “rope” might conjure up “The Monkey-Rope” chapter in Moby-Dick (1851), in which Ishmael and Queequeg are “wedded” to each other by a whaling rope, “fast at both ends,” that makes them interdependent. Each has “the management of one end” of the rope, and they are bound both literally and by “usage and honor” not to cut the rope in an emergency. For Ishmael this means that his “individuality [is] now merged” with Queequeg; the rope has become a “siamese ligature” (Melville 1988: 319-20). Melville imagines, for a moment at least, the lives of an Anglo-U.S. citizen and an Oceanian as twinned, through processes that are at once intimate, and nested within larger historical, economic, and political structures.1 Angela Davis, on the other hand, recodes the charged image of “the rope” to argue the emotional necessity and ethical responsibility of learning about other communities, seen as multiple and not simply geographic, while remaining anchored in her own. Implicit in her sense that this is a “responsibility” (an answer to a call that one hears in the “risky night of

non-knowledge” [Spivak 1994: 25]) is the notion that a rope that does not “allow” enough give for one to “understand and learn” about other communities restricts and denies a need and a call. At the same time, even “long enough” ropes do have limits.