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This chapter focuses on the figure of the captive through which the writers in the Federal era explored the continuum and the difference between Barbary and America. In particular, the claims for repatriation articulated by American-citizen captives in a foreign land are based on a recognition of their country's need to litigate the domestic relationship between master and slave. Moreover, captives translated Barbary referents into American tropes of identity. Ultimately, Barbary types such as Turks, Arabs, and Moors allowed Federal-era readers to negotiate American racial classifications, the limits of American democratic inclusion, and the fantasy of America's exceptional difference through exotic proxies. In the decades that followed, tropes of the Arab were adapted by other American writers, resulting to the emergence of the genre of the Near Eastern travel narrative.

From the nation’s founding inclusion in and exclusion from the U.S. body politic has been racialized. Citizenship and whiteness have been defined in opposition to slavery and blackness, the free white man celebrated as the prototype of the liberty-loving American citizen. “The very structure of American citizenship is white,” political philosophers and historians repeatedly tell us. Yet U.S. democracy took form during one of the most radical periods of human history, the Age of Revolution when the political world appeared remade and the promise of freedom unlimited. Between the 1780s and the War of 1812, increasingly radical political movements crisscrossed the Atlantic challenging absolute monarchies, establishing post-colonial republics and questioning the legitimacy of human slavery. Born of such momentous times, how were U.S. citizenship and democracy constituted as powerful instruments of racial exclusion? How were the majority of US citizens and their political leaders able to reconcile their commitment to the equality of all men with the centuries-old practice of chattel slavery? This essay ponders that conundrum through an exploration of a rapidly growing literary genre, the Barbary captivity narratives, cheaply printed popular accounts of the seizure and enslavement of American sailors by Barbary “pirates.” Focusing on the period between the 1780s and the War of 1812, that epic time when revolutionary fervor — and most especially the Haitian Revolution — made the contradictory interplay of Atlantic slavery and universal rights impossible to ignore, this article will explore the role popular representations of white and black enslavement played in the construction of the new U.S. republic and U.S. citizenship.

This chapter discusses a relatively neglected satirical attack on slavery by Benjamin Franklin, “Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim on the Slave Trade” (1790). It examines the maneuvers employed in the text to displace debates over enslavement practices in the United States onto a distant temporal, spatial, and political plane. The chapter reads the mobilization of the generic framework and affective economies of the Barbary captivity narrative as a textual performance of “ethnic drag.” It discusses the ambivalent effects of this performance to engage with the absent issue of the dehumanization of enslaved blacks. It is argued that Franklin’s satire ultimately remains confined to the realm of a master discourse about the most adequate economic and political forms and norms of a modern state. The abolitionist text thus partakes in establishing and normalizing hegemonic speaking position in the late eighteenth-century Transatlantic sphere.