Examen corrigé Université de Montréal Thèse numérique Papyrus ...

236nationalism and identity. I want to consider this desire for “more” as part of the dialectics ofexcess. Such expansionism and desire for more necessitate an encounter with other cultures.In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabha acutely points out:the colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original andauthoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference. It is a disjunction producedwithin the act of enunciation as a specifically colonial articulation of those twodisproportionate sites of colonial discourse and power: the colonial scene as the inventionof historicity, mastery, mimesis, or as the “other scene” of Enstellung, displacement,fantasy, psychic defense, and an open textuality. (107-8; original italics)This oscillation between ambivalence and difference is what characterizes the colonial andimperial architecture. Following Bhabha’s logic, Moby-Dick, for example, undergoes “anEntstellung, a process of displacement, distortion, repetition” (105). Undergoing this change,Melville’s narrative becomes as ambivalent as the colonial project itself. In a sense, Melville’snarrative personas are always ambivalent. Contextualizing the missed encounter in thedeconstructive postcolonial theory, I shall demonstrate how power and fantasy function to shapethe failed encounters between the East and the West.Jacksonian ideals equate America’s future with its geographical expansionism. “For to be‘manifest,’” Dimock writes, “America’s future must become ‘destiny’which is to say, it mustbe mapped on a special axis, turned into providential design” (15; emphasis mine). This emphasison space characterized both the expansionist discourse of Jacksonian America and the literaryproductions of the time. To shift from time to space, antebellum America wanted to extend itsexpansionism with no regard to time. Quite different from the other Western Empires,expansionist America appeared, in nineteenth-century literary productions, as a timeless Empire.