Abstract
Abstract: This article examines the uses of intimacy in Thomas A. Digges's understudied 1775 novel Adventures of Alonso . Throughout the transatlantic travels of the picaresque hero Alonso, Digges narrates various constellations of intimacy among men in order to espouse an idea of liberal interiority and relationality that depends on the exclusion and affective distancing of racialized, gendered, and sexualized persons and populations. The article reads and contrasts two scenes of male intimacy and their larger repercussions in the novel. In the first, intimacy represents a social feeling that enables and fosters the public reasoning of white men on a ship crossing the Atlantic; in the second, Digges uses the intimacies of the sexually deviant Arab body in a Barbary captivity episode in order to demarcate and police the racial and sexual boundaries of liberal personhood. In doing so, Adventures of Alonso functionalizes intimacy to reorganize the bodies of white men into a fantasy of (proto-) democratic social form while it dismisses the bodies of racial and sexual others as politically expendable.
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