This article takes an object-oriented approach to the analogies between weather events and political events in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851) and Frederick Douglass's 'The Heroic Slave' ( 1853), arguing that marine weathers in these maritime fictions take the measure of the political without being reducible to it. I integrate political-ecological theories of emergency and 'emergence' with the analogic poetics of both objectoriented philosophy and critical race studies to show how stormy weather in these texts carries a special charge in articulating an emergent politics of Black democracy.
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