Experience Of Captivity Research Articles

Where Nothing Happened

This article takes as its subject matter the juridico-political space of the prisoner of war (POW) camp. It sets out to determine the nature of this space by looking at the experience of war captivity by Jewish members of the Western forces in World War II, focusing on the experience of Emmanuel Levinas, who spent 5 years in German war captivity. On the basis of a historical analysis of the conditions in which Levinas spent his time in captivity, it argues that the POW camp was a space of indifference that was determined by the legal exclusion of prisoners from both war and persecution. Held behind the stage of world events, prisoners were neither able to exercise their legal agency nor released from law into a realm of extra-legal violence. Through a close reading of Levinas’s early concept of the ‘there is’ [ il y a], the article seeks to establish the impact on prisoners of prolonged confinement in such a space. It sets out how prisoners’ subjectivity dissolved in the absence of meaningful relations with others and identifies the POW camp as a space in which existence was reduced to indeterminate, impersonal being.

The madness of Justina and Januário Mina. Rethinking boundaries between free and enslaved labor in nineteenth-century Brazil

Based on a new reading of criminal and civil court records first analyzed by the author in Das Cores do Silencio ( On the colors of silence, Rio de Janeiro 1995 ), the article promotes a dialogue between the social history of slavery and the period's political history, particularly in relation to citizenship rights and the legitimacy of slavery under Brazil's constitutional monarchy. Suppression of the illegal Atlantic slave trade starting around 1850 and its replacement by a flourishing domestic slave trade impacted the politics of daily life on large slave plantations, as well as the very experience of captivity and manumission. By reframing court record data on the race, occupation, and migration of free and enslaved workers residing in the Paraiba River Valley plantation area between 1830 and 1888, and by following some fragments of their life stories, we gain insight into the blurry boundaries between slaves and citizens as enslaved and free workers.

Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures by Elizabeth Elliott (review)

Reviewed by: Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures by Elizabeth Elliott Marco Nievergelt Elizabeth Elliott. Remembering Boethius: Writing Aristocratic Identity in Late Medieval French and English Literatures. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Pp. 170. £63.00. Elizabeth Elliott’s book presents a study of late medieval Boethian narratives in the vernacular—French, English, and Scots. Elliott leaves aside more obvious and more frequently studied translations and adaptations of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and concentrates on literary works that are less self-evidently Boethian, by authors such as Guillaume de Machaut, Jean Froissart, Thomas Usk, and King James I of Scotland. She identifies a particular concern with what she calls the “Boethian discipline of memory” (146) across her corpus, and argues that the texts examined “take the Consolation as a model for narratives that address similar, contemporary experiences of the political misfortunes of exile and imprisonment” (13). The introduction begins by providing a broader overview of the cultural resonance of Boethius’s Consolation, its translations, and adaptations in late medieval vernacular culture, with particular emphasis on its popularity with aristocratic readers. Chapter 1 focuses on Machaut’s Confort d’ami, read not only as a piece of consolation addressed to Machaut’s patron, Charles of Navarre, but also as a work that fulfills an ethical purpose by providing what Elliott calls “Boethian political counsel.” Chapter 2 continues this exploration by turning to Machaut’s Remède de Fortune, and examines its discourses on love and desire as a means of Boethian consolation. Chapter 3, the final one on Machaut, turns to the Fonteinne amoureuse, and focuses on motifs of imprisonment as tropes for the Christian, post-lapsarian existential condition. The chapter explores the use of such images as a means of consolation addressed to Machaut’s patron-prisoner, Jean, duke of Berry. Chapter 4 is on Froissart’s Prison amoureuse, and examines how the experience of captivity of another patron, Wenceslas, “is imaginatively recast as a Boethian education, through which he develops the ability to imprison himself through the pleasant exercise of discipline” (94). Chapter 5 turns to Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love, proposing a transcendentalizing reading that departs from recent interpretations to argue that “Usk’s Testament presents a powerful image of the completion of a visionary process of self-development that leaves its subject endowed with the internal stability that characterises the subject able to work towards the establishment of a social justice that prefigures the divine” (122). Chapter 6 [End Page 289] turns to James I’s Kingis Quair, arguing that the poem’s “evocation of mnemonic practices of invention is in sympathy with the conception of the Consolation as depicting a process of therapeutic meditation that entails the exercise of the faculty of memory” (126). A number of interesting points are made in this book, but there are numerous problems at the level of argument, conceptualization, focus, and style. While the study promises to explore the relevance of Boethius for the construction of aristocratic identity, much of the book reads like an extended series of observations on the theme of memory in medieval culture, with special attention given to Boethius and the texts that comprise the study’s corpus. It would have been helpful to provide a separate chapter defining what the “Boethian discipline of memory” really is—i.e., how it differs from mnemonic traditions more broadly and how it is specifically relevant to the construction of aristocratic and political identity—before moving on to the discussion of the actual texts. More seriously, the question of literary self-representation or self-fashioning does not receive the attention it needs: the introduction duly acknowledges that the term pseudo-autobiography “superimposes an anachronistic horizon of generic expectations on texts whose indistinct and mobile forms evince a fluid sense of self” (2), but the question is evoked only in order to be evacuated. No alternative terminology is proposed, and no sustained theoretical discussion of subjectivity, self-representation, or identity construction is provided anywhere in this book. Here, too, a chapter or an extended section would have provided a far more solid basis for subsequent chapters to rest on. Given that the...

Captive Audiences: Sound, Silence, and Listening in Civil War Prisons

This article listens to the role played by sound and silence in Civil War prisons. Applying the methodology of sensory history, it argues that the experience of captivity cannot be understood without considering the aural environment of prisons, including patterns of listening, conflicting interpretations of the same sounds, and the role of sound in resistance. Although war was noisy for participants in general, prisoners had good reason to infuse the aural environment with meaning. Amid the confusion of captivity, prisoners actively listened for clues to help interpret their current circumstances and future prospects. Echoes of battle, voices of civilians, and rumors allowed prisoners to listen beyond the guards and slightly empower themselves. Sound also entwined with how prisoners perceived the passage of time, especially on days they infused with acoustic importance such as Sundays and national holidays. Focusing on listening as a methodology is important because it has the flexibility to incorporate competing interpretations. Keepers and captives attached different patterns of meaning to the same sounds and this is useful to consider in examining lived-experience. Preserving acoustic harmony was part of prison guards’ larger task of maintaining order. Conversely, effective use of noise offered prisoners a unique method of resistance because it utilized one of the few advantages of a weak but numerically superior population. The aural world was a channel of practical knowledge and captivity experience, a point of disagreement between prisoners and guards, and a method of resistance.

Healing in forgiveness: A discussion with Amanda Lindhout and Katherine Porterfield, PhD

In 2008, Amanda Lindhout was kidnapped by a group of extremists while traveling as a freelance journalist in Somalia. She and a colleague were held captive for more than 15 months, released only after their families paid a ransom. In this interview, Amanda discusses her experiences in captivity and her ongoing recovery from this experience with Katherine Porterfield, Ph.D. a clinical psychologist at the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture. Specifically, Amanda describes the childhood experiences that shaped her thirst for travel and knowledge, the conditions of her kidnapping, and her experiences after she was released from captivity. Amanda outlines the techniques that she employed to survive in the early aftermath of her capture, and how these coping strategies changed as her captivity lengthened. She reflects on her transition home, her recovery process, and her experiences with mental health professionals. Amanda's insights provide an example of resilience in the face of severe, extended trauma to researchers, clinicians, and survivors alike. The article ends with an discussion of the ways that Amanda's coping strategies and recovery process are consistent with existing resilience literature. Amanda's experiences as a hostage, her astonishing struggle for physical and mental survival, and her life after being freed are documented in her book, co-authored with Sara Corbett, A House in the Sky.

Josephus on the Servile Origins of the Jews

The story of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt and subsequent redemption is the central narrative element of the Pentateuch. Josephus’ claim that he was providing an accurate account of the Jews’ ancient history in Jewish Antiquities thus meant that he had to address the Jews’ servile origins; however, first-century Roman attitudes toward slaves and freedmen would have made this problematic for ideological and political reasons. Although Josephus added references to Jews’ slavery to the account of Jewish history in Jewish Antiquities, he appears deliberately to downplay the Jews’ servile origins at key parts of the narrative, including God’s promise to Abraham in Gen 15 and the account of the Jews’ enslavement in Exod 1. Josephus also demonstrates a concern with the servile status of Jacob’s secondary wives Zilpah and Bilhah. The account of Joseph’s life in Jewish Antiquities emphasizes his non-servile qualities and his chance enslavement. Roman hostility to slaves and freedmen, Josephus’ own personal experience of captivity, and the likely presence in Rome of Jewish freedmen might explain Josephus’ sensitivity to the Jews’ servile origins.

The romance of Siberian captivity: German POWs of the First World War in Friede H. Kraze's interwar novel The Magical Forests

The literature of the Eastern Front during World War I has not received the same critical attention as has that of its western counterpart. This article will address this lacuna by focusing on a neglected but at the time popular prisoner-of-war novel: Friede H. Kraze's The Magical Forests (Die magischen Wälder) (1933) published under the pseudonym Heinz Gumprecht. The Magical Forests reworks experiences of wartime captivity in Russia and places them in a narrative that demonstrates the prisoners' loyalty to their comrades and to the nation. Russia is portrayed in the novel as feminine, primitive, and backward, qualities that the prisoners find to be both exotic and attractive. The novel is unique in that it not only focuses on the prisoners' suffering but also presents Russian captivity as having allowed the prisoners to forge a revitalized national community based on the values of male soldierly comradeship. This article will analyse Kraze's depictions of the natural landscape and peoples of Russia encountered by the prisoners. It shows how the masculine bonds of comradeship among the prisoners are both reinforced and challenged by their relations with Russian women. While The Magical Forests articulates colonial fantasies of settling and developing Russian territory, the novel also displays a more complex identification with the lands and peoples of the country that challenges the notion of a straight path from turn-of-the-century Russophobia to Nazi anti-Bolshevism.

Setting All the Captives Free: Capture, Adjustment, and Recollection in Allegheny Country, by Ian K. Steele

All the Captives Free: Capture, Adjustment, and Recollection in Allegheny Country, Ian K. Steele. McGill-Queen's Native and Northern Series. Montreal, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2013. xvi, 688 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). Ian K. Steele is not a newcomer to the history of imperial politics, military and frontiers within the Atlantic world context. Indeed, his previous works (and there are many) weave together all these topics grounded in the experiences of colonial North America. This has set the groundwork for his latest contribution. At the heart of this 688-page volume is a goal to reconstruct the world of the Allegheny country through the case studies of captives taken between the years 1745-1765 (before and during the Seven Years and what Steele calls the of 1763-1765). According to the author, by learning as much as possible about all the captives of all the contending groups, and analyzing their capture, adaptation, and fate, it is hoped that our understanding of the events, the captives and the consequences will be greatly improved (p. 3). In order to cover a wide range of topics, the book is divided into four parts. Part One: Captured in Peacetime looks at the different ways Algonquians, Iroquoians, and Europeans took and treated captives before the Seven Years War. Steele argues that the captive taking resulted in provoking the subsequent military conflicts of the eighteenth century. Part Two Captured in War looks at the captivity experience during the Seven Years and the Anglo-Indian War. He alters the perception that captives resisted and attempted to escape. Further, he contends that these wars were not total warfare, as has been described other historians. This is explained looking at raids, sieges, and battles -all of which, he argues, describe a different experience or context for captive taking. Part Three: Captivity, Conversion, and Escape looks at the physical journey to the captor's community, the process of captive selection, and specific emphasis on adoption practices among Native peoples. Equally interesting to Steele are stories of those who escaped and the initiatives to find and re-claim captives. Finally, Part Four: Setting all the Captives Free weeds out the ambiguous nature of the freed captives. It looks at ways European captives became free through gift exchange, ransom, and forcible recaptures. By looking at the objections of returning captives and their metis character, Steele questions the attractiveness of European society. Taken as a whole, Steele's latest work provides an exhaustive and comprehensive database of all those captured in Allegheny Country from 1745-1765. Through a massive survey of colonial newspapers, archival holdings, printed narratives, letters, local folklore and genealogies, Steele has managed to compile an extraordinary amount of information on approximately 6,130 people captured or killed, including: Indians, British, French, and Canadians who were traders, warriors, soldiers, farmers, wives, and children. This information is then made ready to the reader as an appendix, spanning no short of 113 pages! Each entry is organized alphabetically and includes the name (surname if provided), a physical description, and the source from which this data was collected. …

Incarcerated Masculinities: Male POWs and the Second World War

This article serves as an introduction to the themed issue on Incarcerated Masculinities, providing an overview of the literature in this field, including both scholarly texts and personal memoirs. The issue addresses a variety of POW experiences and memories, ranging geographically across incarceration in Europe and the Far East, considers the representation and cultural memory of POWs in the post-war period and engages with the intergenerational transmission of traumatic memories in subsequent decades. This article introduces the experience, impact and legacy of captivity amongst men from Australia, Britain and France during the Second World War which are explored in depth in subsequent articles.

The Role of Sport for Australian POWs of the Turks during the First World War

Nearly 200 Australians were taken prisoner by the Turks during World War I, some 76 of them during the Gallipoli campaign and the remainder over the succeeding three years during the ongoing campaigns against the Ottoman Empire. Approximately a quarter of them died in captivity. In contrast to the experiences of Australians taken prisoner by the Japanese during the Pacific War, Australian history and collective memory, and Australian commemorative activities, have almost totally overlooked the Australian prisoners of the Turks. This article redresses the balance somewhat by looking at an important aspect of the prisoners’ lives; the games they played while in captivity. The article suggests that sports and games were an important part of their methods for coping with the captivity experience, although there were some significant differences in the role sport played for captives of the Turks as compared to the role it played for those taken prisoner by the Japanese in the next World War.

The Crisis of Restoration: Mary Rowlandson’s Lost Home

Catastrophic loss marks Mary Rowlandson's 1682 captivity narrative from almost its opening lines. Toward the end of the first remove she laments her fate in the following long sentence: All was my Husband gone (at least separated from me, he being in the Bay; and to add to my grief, the Indians told me they would kill him as he came homeward) my Children my Relations and Friends and home and comforts within door, and without, was (except my life) and I knew not but the next moment that might go too. (Rowlandson 71) This moment of sorrowful recognition opens with an expression of inclusion and continues by delineating a set of losses. She starts and finishes with a totality--all--and moves from intimate human relationships--my Children ... Relations ... Friends--to material objects that carry an affective load as well as being signifiers of status and well-being--our and home and comforts. They bring mental solace as well as physical and spiritual ease. (1) Since are envisaged as already as she terms it, indicating the depth of her loss, they have also already moved to an imaginary or at the least intangible realm. They can only be restored imaginatively and textually, through language and an act of naming that invokes them momentarily only to register their absence more fully. The sentence finishes by stating that even Rowlandson's future existence was uncertain, for her could be taken from her at any time. Her words resonate with Hamlet's mournful protestation to Polonius that [y]ou cannot take from me anything that I will not more willingly part withal--except my life, except my life, except my life (253), evoking a similar sense of bleakness and dismay. (2) The fleeting verbal reinstatement reveals just how much has a word she uses five times, making her anguish resonate profoundly. The sentence is a lament, compiled from a series of repetitions, each of which suggests a terrible gap caused either by death, absence, or separation. It suggests a longing for a more sustained restitution and the comfort it would bring. Her narrative ultimately reveals the fact that she is both redeemed and then restored, terms that delineate the process of bringing her back into her colonial Puritan family and community. Yet it also shows the way the experience of attack and captivity changes the structure of her family and her affective life. Her youngest child and several close family members die as a direct consequence, so the family's full reunion is not possible. She cannot ever return to the family home, our House from which she was taken, as it has been destroyed in the attack: all was gone, as she puts it. Home is what is lost to Rowlandson at the start of the narrative and is what she aims textually, affectively, and materially to rebuild. The title of her narrative names Rowlandson herself as the subject of this process--A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson--suggesting that it is her restoration from captivity that the first-person work depicts. Yet while this is certainly the case, regarding Rowlandson only as subject to restoration by others elides her persistent preoccupation with what she is restored to and what is restored to her--how she tries to render herself whole once more. The reestablishment of home is of key significance to the larger process charted in her work. Restoration thus emerges as not just adverting to the process of returning a female Puritan captive to her community, as the title of the narrative suggests and its prefatory material by Ter Amicum (3) reiterates, but to defining the terms of colonial encounter through its impact on the home and its articulation using metaphors about home. It suggests that what needs to be repaired is a colonial home that requires spiritual and military protection. The restoration of Mary Rowlandson is also a reinstatement of one set of claims of home and a legitimization of the processes--including the violence--of colonization, settlement, and nation building. …

Reflections on motherhood: an exploratory study with women over 40 years

This article presents an exploratory descriptive study of qualitative character, who seeks to understand how the notion of maternity is perceived and experienced by women, emphasizing experiences of liberation and captivity, as per Burlae’s Theory of Mindful Space (2004). Via the biographical interview proposed by Gersick & Kram (2002), six women over the age of 40 described their lives in the past, present and future. The analysis of results was conducted using the Discourse Analysis proposed by Gill (2002), basing itself on epistemological assumptions from studies of gender, feminine perspective, Lenvinson´s Development Theory (1996) and systemic vision. The results show that the conceptions and experiences of maternity are diverse and complex, presenting different implications in the lives of women. More conservative perspectives interact with more critical views of the mother-woman relationships.

Enduring Captivity: French POW Narratives of World War II

The existence of thousands of post-war novels and autobiographical narratives written about the Second World War in French, many of them critical of the conventional myths and stereotypes bolstered by the political class and media establishment, shows the need for individuals and the sub-groups to which they belong to bear witness to traumatic experiences and to retrieve memories crucial to their identity and recognition as survivors, combatants, or spectators of overwhelming events. The purpose of this essay is to examine the contribution made by narratives of captivity to this process of individual and collective adjustment and reconciliation to defeat and humiliation. One immediate consequence of the 1940 armistice was the surrender and capture of some 1.8 million French soldiers, many of whom remained in German captivity for the rest of the war. Although some 500 mainly literary texts by or about French prisoners of war have been published, few of these narratives have attracted much notice, let alone detailed critical study. My aim here is to analyse a small but representative sample of fictional and semi-autobiographical accounts of captivity, concentrating mainly on authors such as Ambrière, Boulle, Guérin, Hyvernaud, Lanoux, and Perret, whose experience of captivity is presented in works that combine historical testimony with imaginative and innovative writing. Collectively, such works make a significant contribution to our understanding of how ordinary soldiers came to terms with the war and how they strove to communicate this to post-war generations; they also sometimes reveal how the French experience and cultural representation of World War II differ significantly from Anglo-American perceptions.

Revengeful Violence – Hannah Duston’s Captivity Narative and the Puritan Paradox

Abstract The story of Hannah Duston brings forth a new image of the captive Puritan woman, one that is bearing the horrifying specter of violent revenge. The essay dwells on the captive’s way of dealing with the experience of captivity by touching upon Walter Benjamin’s approach on the matter and also by analyzing the moral paradox that arises.

Les prémices de Thiaroye: L’influence de la captivité allemande sur les soldats noirs français à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale

Abstract After repressing the mutiny of West African ex-prisoners in Thiaroye near Dakar on 1 December 1944, the French military authorities concluded that the German treatment of these prisoners had made them prone to revolting. Allegedly, the Germans had planned to destabilize French colonialism by treating the prisoners well (despite the German army massacres of black French soldiers in June 1940) and by allowing black prisoners to enter into intimate relationships with white French women. The article critically analyzes the explanations of the French authorities for the revolt of Thiaroye, tracing the motivations of the ex-prisoners to the way they interpreted Free French policies after liberation in the context of their captivity experience. It argues that the relatively correct German treatment of the African POWs after the summer of 1940 and the contacts of prisoners with French civilians were circumstantial and not part of a deliberate German policy to incite revolts in the French colonies. Ultimately, the unruliness of African ex-prisoners resulted much less from German measures than from the disillusioning experience of the soldiers with the Vichy and Free French authorities during and after captivity, which formed a powerful contrast to the mostly friendly and respectful treatment of the Africans by the French civilian population.

Predictors of PTSD trajectories following captivity: A 35-year longitudinal study

Although war captivity is a potent pathogen for psychiatric illness, little is known about the long-term trajectories of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among ex-prisoners of wars (ex-POWs). This study aimed to assess the long-term trajectories of PTSD and their predictors following war captivity. Three follow-ups (1991, 2003, 2008) were conducted over 35 years of 164 Israeli ex-POWs and185 comparable combatants from the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Ex-POWs reported higher PTSD rates than controls at all three assessments. Four trajectories of PTSD were identified: chronic PTSD, delayed PTSD, recovery and resilience. The majority of POWs reported delayed PTSD, while the majority of controls were classified as resilient. While PTSD rates remained relatively stable over time among controls, a steep increase in rates was observed among POWs between 1991 and 2003, followed by stabilization in rates between 2003 and 2008. Finally, subjective experience of captivity was the variable that best distinguished between the resilience and PTSD groups of ex-POWs, followed by participation in previous wars and negative life events during childhood. War captivity carries long-lasting psychiatric implications, even decades after release. Aging processes, as well as unique stressors that exist in Israel, may account for the elevated PTSD rates found here.

The relationship between posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms and paternal parenting of adult children among ex-prisoners of war: A longitudinal study.

The aversive impact of combat and combat-induced posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on parenting of young children has been examined in a few studies. Nevertheless, the toll of war captivity on parenting and the long-term relations between posttraumatic symptoms and paternal parenting of adult children remains unknown. This longitudinal study examined paternal parenting of adult children among war veterans, some of whom were held in captivity. Furthermore, we examined the mediating role of PTSD symptoms in the association between captivity and parenting. The sample included two groups of male Israeli veterans from the 1973 Yom Kippur War: ex-prisoners of war (ex-POWs) and comparable veterans who had not been held captive. Both groups were assessed via self-report measures of PTSD at three time points: Time 1 (18 after the war), Time 2 (30 after the war), and Time 3 (35 after the war) years after the war. Results shows that ex-POWs reported lower levels of positive parenting compared to comparison group veterans at Time 3. Furthermore, PTSD symptoms at Time 1, Time 2, and Time 3 mediated the association between captivity experience and parenting at Time 3. In addition, it was found that increases in the levels of PTSD symptom clusters over time were associated with lower levels of positive parenting at Time 3.

Les prémices de Thiaroye: L’influence de la captivité allemande sur les soldats noirs français à la fin de la Seconde Guerre mondiale

After repressing the mutiny of West African ex-prisoners in Thiaroye near Dakar on 1 December 1944, the French military authorities concluded that the German treatment of these prisoners had made them prone to revolting. Allegedly, the Germans had planned to destabilize French colonialism by treating the prisoners well (despite the German army massacres of black French soldiers in June 1940) and by allowing black prisoners to enter into intimate relationships with white French women. The article critically analyzes the explanations of the French authorities for the revolt of Thiaroye, tracing the motivations of the ex-prisoners to the way they interpreted Free French policies after liberation in the context of their captivity experience. It argues that the relatively correct German treatment of the African POWs after the summer of 1940 and the contacts of prisoners with French civilians were circumstantial and not part of a deliberate German policy to incite revolts in the French colonies. Ultimately, the unruliness of African ex-prisoners resulted much less from German measures than from the disillusioning experience of the soldiers with the Vichy and Free French authorities during and after captivity, which formed a powerful contrast to the mostly friendly and respectful treatment of the Africans by the French civilian population.

Genetic characterization and artificial reproduction attempt of endemic Sardinian trout Salmo trutta L., 1758 (Osteichthyes, Salmonidae): Experiences in captivity

Native species of Sardinian brown trout (Salmo trutta) have declined drastically because of the introduction of non-native salmonids, overharvesting, and habitat degradation. One approach to conservation of declining species is to establish new populations through repopulation with genetically certified fish. In this study, samples of brown trout from seven rivers in Sardinia were analysed to look for the presence of pure individuals of the endemic Sardinian trout. Analyses of the mitochondrial DNA control region and the LDH-C1* gene revealed the presence of non-endemic and hybrid individuals in four of the seven rivers analysed. In addition, we reared a stock of native Sardinian trout at the experimental fish farm of Sadali and had them reproduce artificially. This experiment provided more knowledge about the incubation phase, hatching, reabsorption of the vitelline sac and the initial phases of growth, which can be used to develop more optimal management of this resource.

Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulation of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulation of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds Galen Brokaw Keywords Galen Brokaw, Lisa Voigt, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulation of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds, the New World, Colonialism, Spain, Captivity Voigt, Lisa . Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulation of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2009. 339 pp. Almost immediately after J. H. Elliott originally published his argument some forty years ago about the "blunted" impact of the Americas on Europe in the early modern period, other scholars began challenging this view. Indeed, Elliott himself [End Page 443] subsequently reconsidered his understanding of this relationship. Over the last several decades, one of the most interesting fields of research has focused precisely on the nature of this impact. Whether directly or indirectly, Elliott's argument set forth the terms of a research question that has informed numerous studies. In Elliott's original argument, "blunted impact" referred to the idea that the discovery of, or encounter with, the New World did not have the kind of immediate effect that one might assume in retrospect. One might say that research that argues against this thesis does not refute the "bluntness" of the impact, but rather demonstrates the true nature of the metaphor: although on the surface, the effects of blunt trauma are not as immediately obvious or dramatic, they are far more extensive and profound than more acute injuries. In fact, blunt trauma may cause injuries below the surface with long-lasting effects that are often difficult to identify. Such difficulties are precisely what continue to make this field so productive and interesting. Lisa Voigt's recent book, Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic, which is primarily a work of insightful textual analysis, does not take as its central concern the larger implications of the NewWorld impact, but her research emerges from, and is informed by, this field. Voigt broadens our understanding of the early modern period through an examination of the way captivity narratives function in the relationship between the Old and the New Worlds. The first chapter of Voigt's book explores the connection between accounts of Old World and New World captivity. She analyzes captivity narratives that appear in texts by Hans Staden, Cabeza de Vaca, Cervantes, Mascarenha, and the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The main point here is not that New World narratives were necessarily more significant than Old World ones, but rather that they participate in the discourse of captivity narratives in the same way that other texts do. Voigt uncovers a dialogic relationship between Old and New World narratives that has gone unnoticed in previous scholarship. Her insightful textual analyses address the central question of the chapter while remaining grounded in a contextualization of the debates about verisimilitude and artifice that were being played out in these texts as well. The second chapter focuses on the final section of Garcilaso's La Florida del Inca, which includes a number of captivity narratives. Voigt argues that Garcilaso both explicitly and implicitly draws a parallel between the condition of captivity and that of exile. His treatment of captivity is particularly important for the larger thesis of Voigt's book because Garcilaso is conscious of the dialogic processes through which captives and exiles pass. Chapter 3 turns to the creole project of Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán's Cautiverio feliz. This autobiographical text recounts the "happy captivity" of the author among the Mapuche of Chile in the seventeenth century. Pineda's account differs significantly from the others analyzed up to this point in that it conveys a [End Page 444] much more conciliatory perspective while avoiding the cultural transformations that characterize the earlier narratives of captivity. Pineda does not "go native" as do the Spanish captives in Florida. The mediating role evolves through his experience of captivity rather than as a result of an initial cultural transformation and a subsequent return to Spanish civilization. The fourth chapter moves to José de Santa Rita Durão's eighteenth-century Portuguese...