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American Genesis, American Captivity

John Saillant

in Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753-1833

A new racism arose in the early American republic that set aside the antislavery arguments of men and women who were, like Lemuel Haynes, rooted in eighteenth‐century modes of thought like Edwardsean ... More

A new racism arose in the early American republic that set aside the antislavery arguments of men and women who were, like Lemuel Haynes, rooted in eighteenth‐century modes of thought like Edwardsean theology and republican ideology. Haynes had always argued that blacks and whites must live harmoniously in an integrated society if Americans wished to be true to Calvinism and republicanism. In the early nineteenth century, many Americans became convinced that blacks and whites were so separate cognitively and physically that they could never coexist as equals. Haynes set himself against what he saw as divisive forces, including Universalism, a new Christian denomination led by Hosea Ballou. Haynes invoked as a standard for race relations the godly unity idealized in American Puritanism and expressed in early American texts such as the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson. In his last years, Haynes worked as an itinerant preacher but never held a reliable pulpit between his dismissal in 1818 from his Rutland, Vermont, church and his death in 1833 in Granville, Massachusetts.Less

John Dunn Hunter, Tecumseh, and the Linguistic Politics of Pan-Indianism

Robert Lawrence Gunn

in Ethnology and Empire: Languages, Literature, and the Making of the North American Borderlands

Chapters 3 and 4 revisit the famous case of John Dunn Hunter as a means of reading comparatively the Shawnee leader Tecumseh’s Pan-Indian movement in the Old Northwest and the ill-fated Red and White ... More

Chapters 3 and 4 revisit the famous case of John Dunn Hunter as a means of reading comparatively the Shawnee leader Tecumseh’s Pan-Indian movement in the Old Northwest and the ill-fated Red and White Republic of Fredonia spearheaded by Hunter near Nacogdoches, Texas, in the 1820s. Author of a popular captivity narrative and ethnographic treatise on Plains Peoples, Hunter championed Tecumseh’s Pan-Indian politics and published the only record of the latter’s speech before the Osage—only to be denounced by Cass and Clark as an imposter, his writings fabrications. Revisiting his case here, and the vehemence with which he was attacked in the 1820s, reveals the degree to which the ideological struggle to shape an emergent national narrative concerning Indian Removal in the 1820s was impacted by 19th-Century Indian linguistics, while underscoring the challenges of working with sources of oral and manual evidence on the margins of historical verifiability.Less

Still Hungry

Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, and Mary Rowlandson

in Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

This chapter features the user-amended captivity narratives of Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie. These two, not known and most likely not welcome to Mary Rowlandson, proceed to edit her Sovereignty ... More

This chapter features the user-amended captivity narratives of Louise Erdrich, and Sherman Alexie. These two, not known and most likely not welcome to Mary Rowlandson, proceed to edit her Sovereignty and Goodness of God, turning it into a narrative about indigenous suffering and inventiveness.The three in fact have more than a little in common. Rowlandson, a “wolfish” reader by her own account, made so by her raging and unappeasable hunger, perpetuates that eating disorder as a reading disorder, devouring the gastronomic language of the Bible as additive substance. Hunger here is energizing rather than disabling. Extending from Rowlandson to Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie, it turns the captivity narrative into a long-running and input-rich genre, linking the hungry Puritan to two Native readers, with hungers of their own and writing counterfactual histories out of that deficit. Such virtual realities turn the most inhospitable of genres into the most intimate, aligning it with indigenous agency, and reclaiming the past as a yet-to-be-realized future.Less

Introduction

Lisa Voigt

in Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulations of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds

This book describes how European publics were captivated by tales of Christians held prisoner by religious and political adversaries. Imperial expansion, spearheaded by Portugal and Spain in the ... More

This book describes how European publics were captivated by tales of Christians held prisoner by religious and political adversaries. Imperial expansion, spearheaded by Portugal and Spain in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, increased the geographical range in which subjects could fall into enemy hands as well as the forms that narratives of captivity could take. Imperial administrators heard survivors' oral reports. Pirates and privateers interrogated captured enemy pilots, who, in turn, presented accounts to their own sovereigns upon their release. Inquisition officials evaluated depositions attesting to ransomed captives' religious integrity. This study explores the role of captivity in the production of knowledge, identity, and authority in the early modern imperial world by examining texts written by and about European and Euro-American captives in a variety of languages and genres.Less

The Barbarous Voice of Democracy

Jacob Rama Berman

in American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth Century Imaginary

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 ... More

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.Less

Meditating on Slavery in the Age of Revolution: Barbary Captivities and the Whitening of American Democracy

Carroll Smith-Rosenberg

in Warring for America: Cultural Contests in the Era of 1812

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 ... More

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.Less

War Stories and Tales from the Frontier

Tim Fulford

in Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756-1830

This chapter describes in detail captivity narratives and soldiers' memoirs from the Seven Years' War and the War of Independence of their encounters with Indians.

John Tanner/Shaw-shaw-wa-be-nase

Tim Fulford

in Romantic Indians: Native Americans, British Literature, and Transatlantic Culture 1756-1830

This chapter examines the career and writing of ‘white indian’, John Tanner. It includes discussions on captivity narrative, culture crossing, hybridity, the way Indians portrayed whites, colonial ... More

This chapter examines the career and writing of ‘white indian’, John Tanner. It includes discussions on captivity narrative, culture crossing, hybridity, the way Indians portrayed whites, colonial politics, tribal politics, and identity.Less

Christians in The Arabian Nights

Nabil Matar

in The Arabian Nights in Historical Context: Between East and West

The authors of the Arabian Nights did not view the Christians as monolithic, undifferentiated, and adversarial villains, as some critics have argued. The single story about the Coptic Egyptian in ... More

The authors of the Arabian Nights did not view the Christians as monolithic, undifferentiated, and adversarial villains, as some critics have argued. The single story about the Coptic Egyptian in China in the 14th-century Syrian manuscript reflected an idyllic and invented past, invoked through the figure of a caliph who ruled an empire never perturbed by external or internal upheavals, diseases, or invading armies. That positive depiction of the Christian changed in the last recension of the Nights (the Bulaq edition). As the stories moved westward from Baghdad to the Byzantine world and to the Franks, the Christians who in the Baghdad or the China of the Syrian manuscript had been as native to the world of Islam as the "nasara" of the Quran became adversarial and alien living in the piratical port of Genoa. Focusing on the stories in the Nights that include Christian figures, this chapter shows the difference in representing Christians of the Arabic East as against Christians of the Byzantine world and the Frankish Mediterranean. In the last case, parallels are drawn with medieval and early modern European captivity narratives.Less

Contesting the press-oppressors of the age: the captivity narrative of William Okeley (1675)

Catherine Vigier

in Radical Voices, Radical Ways: Articulating and Disseminating Radicalism in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain

Catherine Vigier discusses the diffusion of radical ideas from the perspective of a captivity narrative, William Okeley’s Ebenezer, published by the radical printer Nathaniel Ponder. Her premise is ... More

Catherine Vigier discusses the diffusion of radical ideas from the perspective of a captivity narrative, William Okeley’s Ebenezer, published by the radical printer Nathaniel Ponder. Her premise is that this captivity narrative is best apprehended as a literary text constructed in the light of political and ideological debates of its age since if offers a veiled criticism of events nearer home under the guise of a remote setting and plot. The publication of Okeley’s narrative is to be interpreted as an act of militant Protestantism in a culture of dissent at a time which witnessed increased repression against dissenters. She analyses biblical and mythological references in both Okeley’s narrative and Andrew Marvell’s pamphlets to support her claim that the Okeley text carried the polemic around Marvell’s The Rehearsal Transpros’d to a wider public and that publishing this captivity narrative, a popular literary genre, allowed Ponder and his collaborators to make a further case for freedom of speech.Less

Bewildered Sympathy

Abram C. Van Engen

in Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New England

The Sovereignty and Goodness of God reveals not just how Puritans used fellow feeling to build up, define, and bind together their communities, but also how sympathy could break down the very ... More

The Sovereignty and Goodness of God reveals not just how Puritans used fellow feeling to build up, define, and bind together their communities, but also how sympathy could break down the very boundaries it was meant to construct. Mary Rowlandson, at times, finds herself sharing mutual affections with her captors. Yet the more she recognizes such sympathy, the more she rejects cross-racial fellow feeling—precisely because sympathy always implies a joining together, a union, a community. In her focus on reconstructing a racially identified English emotional community, moreover, Rowlandson situates her captivity narrative in a domain outside of politics. Longing for an imagined past of mutual affections, the alienated Rowlandson points readers toward a lost and longed-for domestic sphere revolving around a mother’s place in the home. In doing so, this chapter claims, her narrative aligns with, and anticipates, many of the same goals and strategies of later American sentimental fiction.Less

The Captive’s Lament: Reinterpreting Rowlandson’s Narrative

Lisa Brooks

in Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip's War

This chapter presents a nuanced close reading of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God . . . A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, framed within Indigenous geographies. ... More

This chapter presents a nuanced close reading of The Sovereignty and Goodness of God . . . A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, framed within Indigenous geographies. Although Rowlandson conveyed a picture of a forbidding wilderness, she traveled through an intricately mapped network of Indigenous people and places, including the Nipmuc interior and the Connecticut River Valley. This chapter provides an alternative map and narrative of Rowlandson’s “removes” through Native towns and territories and elucidates the ways in which the stories of Weetamoo, James Printer, and Mary Rowlandson intertwined. Shortly after the raid on her town of Lancaster, Rowlandson was carried to the Nipmuc stronghold of Menimesit, where she encountered James and his extended family, and was given to Weetamoo, whom she followed deep into the interior of Nipmuc and Sokoki countries, as the saunkskwa sought protective sanctuaries for Native families who were evading colonial troops.Less

The 1791 revolt and the borderland from below

Maria Cristina Fumagalli

in On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic

This chapter analyses three autobiographical captivity narratives by white eyewitnesses who were taken prisoners by the rebels just after the slave revolt of 1791 and put them in dialogue with five ... More

This chapter analyses three autobiographical captivity narratives by white eyewitnesses who were taken prisoners by the rebels just after the slave revolt of 1791 and put them in dialogue with five fictional reconstructions of the rebellion and its aftermath. The three captivity narratives, known as récits historiques or historical accounts, were published in 1793 in Cap-Français. The five fictional texts are Victor Hugo's Bug-Jargal (1819 and 1826) and ‘The Saint Domingue Revolt’(1845); Jean-Baptiste Picquenard's Adonis, ou le bon nègre (1798) and Zoflra, ou la bonne negrèsse (1801); and Madison Smartt Bell's All Souls' Rising (1995). All these fictional and non-fictional narratives contain numerous references to the role played by the colonial frontier and the borderland in the unfolding of the events that drove slaves to revolt against whites in Saint Domingue.Less

Captured!: POAU and the National Campaign against Captive Schools

Kathleen Holscher

in Religious Lessons: Catholic Sisters and the Captured Schools Crisis in New Mexico

This chapter deals with the organization Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU), and the captive schools campaign it promoted in response to sister-taught ... More

This chapter deals with the organization Protestants and Other Americans United for Separation of Church and State (POAU), and the captive schools campaign it promoted in response to sister-taught public education. In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1947 decision in Everson v. Board of Education, New Mexico’s schools and others like them became mediums for deferring disagreements among the group’s broad coalition of Protestants. Early members of POAU, including Joseph Dawson, Frank Mead, and Paul Blanshard, publicized and lent aid to the Zellers lawsuit as the organization’s flagship project. The captivity narratives the group employed when it spread the word about the Dixon case were both a flexible entrée into litigation and a rallying cry meant to remind its membership and the American public about the threat of Catholic power, as well as the foundational relationship between Protestantism and the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause in an era that many feared advancing secularism.Less

Capturing Paul: F. C. Baur and the Rise of the Pauline Captivity Narrative

Benjamin L. White

in Remembering Paul: Ancient and Modern Contests over the Image of the Apostle

Chapter 2 explores the development and influence of the Pauline Captivity narrative, the dominant story about “Paul in the second century” from the mid-nineteenth century until the late 1970s. ... More

Chapter 2 explores the development and influence of the Pauline Captivity narrative, the dominant story about “Paul in the second century” from the mid-nineteenth century until the late 1970s. Beginning with F. C. Baur, the proponents of this narrative envisioned a second-century Pauline Captivity to Marcion and the “Gnostics,” whose apocalyptic dualism made them the natural receptors of Paul’s radical theology of divine grace. The dearth of references to Paul in several proto-orthodox writers is indicative of their embarrassment about or outright opposition to Paul. More important than describing the narrative and its influence in Pauline Studies, this chapter examines the foundation of its particular image of the historical Paul in the theological preferences of nineteenth-century radical German Protestantism.Less

The Kadi of Malta

Joshua M. White

in Piracy and Law in the Ottoman Mediterranean

This chapter turns to the Ottoman victims of Catholic corsairs and pirates who were carried off to Malta and Livorno to be sold as slaves and/or held for ransom. It focuses on the Ottoman magistrates ... More

This chapter turns to the Ottoman victims of Catholic corsairs and pirates who were carried off to Malta and Livorno to be sold as slaves and/or held for ransom. It focuses on the Ottoman magistrates (kadis) who, as judge-notaries, as captives, and as official mouthpieces of the Ottoman state, were involved in every stage of the ransom slavery industry in the eastern Mediterranean. From the late sixteenth century to the early eighteenth century, a number of Ottoman judges could always be found imprisoned in Maltese dungeons, where their legal expertise proved critical for preparing surety agreements and ransom contracts acceptable in courts throughout the Ottoman Mediterranean. The phenomenon of the kadis of Malta reflects the essential paradox of the seventeenth-century Ottoman Mediterranean: the inverse relationship between Ottoman maritime security and the importance of Ottoman law as an almost universally acceptable legal lingua franca from Istanbul to Malta.Less

Benjamin Franklin’s Ethnic Drag – Notes on Abolition, Satire, and Affect

Carsten Junker

in Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century

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 ... More

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.Less

Awful Disclosures of Mormonism: Convents, Polygamy, and the Fear of Female Sexual Deviance

Cassandra L. Yacovazzi

in Escaped Nuns: True Womanhood and the Campaign Against Convents in Antebellum America

Anti-Catholicism flourished alongside anti-Mormonism. Opposition to Mormonism largely focused on polygamy, something Protestant Americans felt threatened female sexual purity, traditional marriage, ... More

Anti-Catholicism flourished alongside anti-Mormonism. Opposition to Mormonism largely focused on polygamy, something Protestant Americans felt threatened female sexual purity, traditional marriage, and the family. Just as convent narratives warned of the deception used to lure women into the cloister, Mormon captivity narratives detailed the deceptive ways Latter-day Saints enticed young, vulnerable women into the church and polygamous marriages. Awful Disclosures of Mormonism, a book that blatantly borrowed its title from Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery, described a young woman’s seduction by a charming Mormon man before being trapped in a miserable plural marriage. These and other Mormon captivity narratives presented polygamy as a threat to the purity and utility of a woman. This chapter examines the similarities among Mormon and convent captivity narratives, analyzing the way both focused on the alleged threats to female sexual purity, marriage, and the family.Less

Foreign Parts: English Readers and Foreign Lands and Cultures

Margaret J. M. Ezell

in The Oxford English Literary History: Volume V: 1645-1714: The Later Seventeenth Century

An overview of the literature describing English encounters with foreign cultures, including captivity narratives from New England, the Barbary pirates, and encounters with Turks and the Ottoman ... More

An overview of the literature describing English encounters with foreign cultures, including captivity narratives from New England, the Barbary pirates, and encounters with Turks and the Ottoman Empire. Readers continued to enjoy travel narratives from earlier expeditions to China and Japan, which had established conventions of depicting the orient. Many of these volumes included engravings of exotic flora and fauna and native costumes.Less

Novels of Travel and Exploration

Gretchen Murphy

in The Oxford History of the Novel in English: Volume 5: The American Novel to 1870

This chapter examines the influence of the travel genre on the American novel during the nineteenth century, as well as the novel’s influence on how Americans viewed travel and adventure. It also ... More

This chapter examines the influence of the travel genre on the American novel during the nineteenth century, as well as the novel’s influence on how Americans viewed travel and adventure. It also considers the relationship of fictional works to their fictional and nonfictional sources and intertexts, first by explaining the concept of “adventure” as a genre using Barbary captivity narratives as a test case. It then turns to novels about South Seas and Antarctic exploration inspired by the US Exploring Expedition of 1838–1842, along with novels called “Robinsonades” and their use of fantasy and adventure to address questions about industrial capitalism and slavery, territorial and overseas expansion, U.S. national identity, and American exceptionalism. Finally, the chapter explores travel narratives about California during the wave of Anglo migration that followed the US-Mexico War.Less