Captivity Narratives Research Articles

IMAGE COMMUNICATION BEFORE DEMOCRACY PARTY

Politics ahead of the contestation cannot be separated from efforts to build an image. The key is to take advantage of the available time to optimize your appearance. Through visual polish and captivating narratives, the media is used as a means of channeling the desire for power. No matter the bad past track record, the quality and competence are still below average, all these shortcomings can be covered by packaging the symbol in such a way. Emphasis on the function of media influence, more emphasis on messages that explain that the figure who is being imaged as the successor of the national leadership has been conveyed. It's just that it is impossible to act openly by asking for support from the community, considering the rules forbid it. Instead, use the media as a manipulation tool to conjure up politicians to be popular in the eyes of their constituents. With regard to this theme, the research aims to reveal the messages used in political socialization. The approach used is a qualitative method with semiotic analysis techniques regarding the signs used by politicians in building self-image in the community. Keywords: politics, message, socialization

New Zealand in Great Famine Era Irish politics: The strange case of A Narrative of the Sufferings of Maria Bennett

A Narrative of the Sufferings of Maria Bennett, a crudely printed, eight-page pamphlet, was published in Dublin in spring 1846. It has been interpreted as an early fiction concerning New Zealand, or alternatively as a New Zealand ‘captivity narrative’, possibly based on the author’s own experiences. Against these readings, it is argued here that Maria Bennett, more concerned with Ireland than New Zealand, is a piece of pro-British propaganda hurried out in connection with the British Government’s ‘Protection of Life (Ireland) Bill’ – generally referred to simply as the ‘Coercion Bill’ – first debated on 23 February 1846. The Great Famine had begun with the substantial failure of Ireland’s staple potato crop in autumn 1845. This led to an increase in lawlessness, and the Government planned to combine its relief measures with draconian new security regulations. The story of Maria Bennett, a fictional young Irishwoman transported to Australia but shipwrecked in New Zealand, was designed to advertise the humanity of British law. Having escaped from the Māori, she manages to get to London, where she is pardoned by Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, the man responsible for the Coercion Bill. New Zealand, imagined at the very beginning of the British colonial era, functions in the text as a dark analogy to Ireland, a sort of pristine example of the ‘savage’ conditions making British rule necessary and desirable in the first place. A hungry, lawless Ireland could descend to that level of uncivilization, unless, the propagandist urges, it accepts more British law.

Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival

CULTURAL AND TOURISM DIVERSITY ON INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT OF BANDUNG CULTURAL AND TOURISM BOARD: A DISCOURSE ANALYSIS APPROACH

Cultural diversity is one of the nation's wealth that can be a tourist attraction in an area. The city of Bandung as the capital city of West Java Province has the potential and allure of tourism so that it can attract tourists to come. The Bandung City Tourism Culture Office is one of the offices that maximizes their official Instagram account @ disbudpar.bdg as a medium for promoting various tourist attractions and cultural diversity as one of the attractions of Bandung for tourists. The promotional content displayed in the Instagram account feeds represents the cultural and tourism diversity of Bandung city. Various potentials and cultural attractions are displayed in visual images and captivating narratives. The previous studies focuses on the potential value of Instagram for promoting tourism site in Indonesia, especially in Malang and Bali, and describing how Instagram creating brand destination through photography side.This study analyzes the topics presented and the linguistic instruments used as markers of cultural diversity and tourism in these contents. The analysis uses Fairclough's Critical Discourse Analysis (1995) theory regarding text analysis and the research method is descriptive quantitative. Topics that are displayed such as tourist attractions, art attractions, the use of Sundanese language, culinary tours, etc. show the various cultures and arts from the city of Bandung. The results of the analysis show that there are 11 classification of topics regarding cultural diversity and tourism namely

“I would not comply”

Abstract Many notable scholars have focused on the breakdown of Indian-white relations in Pennsylvania during the Seven Years’ War and the near total collapse of relations that occurred in the region. While there is evidence to suggest there were areas of accommodation in other mid-Atlantic regions, the situation in Pennsylvania between settlers and the Native population was particularly brutal. This study focuses attention on three groups of historical actors who were heavily involved in the breakdown—the Delaware, the Scots Irish Covenanters, and the provincial Quakers—through the lens of the captivity narrative of Jean McCord Lowry. Lowry's unique narrative exemplifies the Covenanter experience of the Seven Years’ War. As part of a larger body of research, this study suggests that what lay at the heart of all the other considerations in Pennsylvania during the Seven Years’ War—for land, riches, conquest, and revenge—was a Euro-American war of religion.

Native Bondage, Narrative Mobility: African American Accounts of Indian Captivity

The article studies African American narratives of indigenous captivity from its emergence in the mid-eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth. Taking accounts by Briton Hammon, John Marrant, Henry Bibb, and James Beckwourth as examples, the essay charts the development of this body of writings, its distinction from white-authored narratives, and its contribution to North American autobiography. In so doing, the article argues that the black-authored texts strategically employed only certain elements of the Indian captivity narrative and that they blended these with aspects of other types of Western autobiography to claim black people's agency and discursive authority in white-dominated print culture.

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman (review)

Reviewed by: Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman Steffi Dippold Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities. By Andrew Newman. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 236 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. What was a book? What was the role of reading in colonial America? In his absorbing Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities, Andrew Newman reconsiders these important questions by looking at the physicality of printed texts and the reception and circulation of books within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century captivity narratives. Newman challenges conventional approaches to early modern literacy and intertextual allusion by drawing attention to scenes in which captives engage with a spectrum of print practices and books as material objects—both their own and those of their Indigenous captors. His focus is on nonfictional stories of captives because he recognizes this genre—gestated from harrowing conditions of isolation, violence, and trauma—as a rare archive not only of Indigenous behavior and belief systems but also of colonial hermeneutic strategies that, because of their unfamiliarity and historical distance, require reconstruction. Breathing new life into American book studies and histories of reading, Newman’s ambitious work issues a riposte to the understanding of literacy and print culture as exclusively imperial. Its revelation of arresting and untracked colonial and Native uses of books joins exciting new scholarship by Lindsay DiCuirci, Phillip H. Round, Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, and Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss that complicate assumptions of how texts and literacy mattered across cultures in early America.1 As Newman’s title stresses, his work is both a study in allegory and an appeal for a better understanding of the complex lives of print and writing in the colonies. Many stories of captivity, he shows, brim with teasing metareflections about books (often gifted by Native captors), scattered material cultures of letters and notes, and scenes of reading and remembering other texts. To do justice to this rich spectrum of activities, Newman deliberately broadens the narrow concept of literacy defined as “the ability to read and write” and explores instead what he open-endedly calls “literacy events” (3). This shift is significant. It creates critical awareness for a [End Page 774] network of undertheorized practical, embodied, and imagined practices and anxieties of the period related but not limited to print. A case in point is the paranoid fantasy of the kidnapped James Smith, who panicked out of fear that “reading my books” might push his Iroquois captors into “puting [sic] me to death” (1).2 Why do captives imagine death by reading, Newman asks? What can such literacy events tell us about the understanding of books, self, community, and American cultures of reading at large? Much like a captivity narrative, Allegories of Encounter moves from familiar canonic materials to the increasingly unfamiliar and underexplored. The first four chapters discuss symbolic reading and consumption of texts, or how captives attributed “another sense” (13)—typically a secondary allegorical spiritual meaning—to their literal descriptions of capture and exile. Here Newman’s primary target of analysis is Christian typology, the hermeneutic heart of Puritan practical piety, as he shows how ordinary people recycled biblical scripts to articulate a sense of self in extraordinary circumstances. Guiding readers from Mary Rowlandson’s canonical The Soveraignty and Goodness of God in the first chapter, to captivity’s model master narrative Psalm 137 in the second, to accounts of capture by the Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues and the Puritan minister John Williams in the third, and to the narratives of the converted Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha and the Puritan-abductee-turned-Native Marguerite Kanenstenhawi (also known as Eunice Williams) in the fourth, Newman’s detailed close-readings unpack messy multilayered textual cultures that linger in-between the spoken, the embodied, the handwritten, and the printed.3 Refusing to distinguish theory from practice or the symbolic from the experiential, Newman recovers how, not only in retrospective scribal practices but in their actual lives, captives lived allegory “like lucid dreamers, aware and motivated by the significance of the stories they were...

Offshore Detention in Australia: Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018)

This article focuses on the “Pacific Solution,” the Australian national policy of controlling illegal migration by detaining refugees in Immigrant Detention Centres in offshore Pacific islands of Manus and Nauru, and the human rights issues it raises. It refers to Behrouz Boochani’s prize-winning refugee memoir, No Friend but the Moun- tains: Writing from Manus Prison (2018) as both a prison narrative of resilience and a politically resistant text, and it discusses Boochani’s representation of Manus Detention camp as “The Kyriarchal System” in terms of Foucault’s “monstrous heterotopia.” The ar- ticle emphasises the issues of accountability and responsibility in the bilateral governance arrangements of the Manus Detention Centre between Australia and Papua New Guinea, and considers the possibility of more humane detention practices in the future.

Revisiting Trauma: Wounds Seen and Unseen in Canadian and Indian Prison Narratives

Trauma Studies and Prison Narratives have emerged over the past few decades as the most significant fields in the humanities. There has been a significant discussion regarding the psychological effects of incarceration; however, literature examining prison as a site of trauma is unusual. Focusing on Iftikhar Gilani's My Days in Prison (2005) and Yvonne Johnson and Rudy Wiebe's Stolen Life: The Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), the article analyzes how prison narratives represent prison as a violent space that inflicts trauma in its characters. These prison narratives represent Yvonne Johnson, the prisoner in Stolen Life, and Gilani as victims of acute psychological trauma faced due to the sheer viciousness of the prison system. The article also concentrates on how the prison experience is both similar and different in Canada and India.

“A Jail within a Jail”: Concealment and Unveiling as Narrative Structure in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys

ABSTRACT This essay analyzes Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys through the prism of the tension between concealment and unveiling, and its impact on the text’s rhetorical, narrative and ideological structure. The novel focuses on its main character’s experience of confinement at Nickel School, a juvenile correction institution. Like most prison narratives, it conceptualizes such experience in terms of an opposition between outside and inside, sliding over the legal and ethical dialectics between freedom and confinement. Thus, a rhetorical structure is articulated in the text around these and other parallel binaries: visible-concealed, public-secret/private. My interpretation of the novel relates these dichotomies to the pattern of confinement and redemption which is typical of the African American prison narrative. Furthermore, in terms of narrative progression, the text is organized as a structure of unveiling, in which the delayed disclosure of key information regarding the main characters forces a reconsideration of the entire sequence of events organized through causal relations. The novel relies on the mechanism of the “surprise ending” in order to solve its structural tensions, provoking not only the reconstruction of its lineal sequence, but a readjustment in the readers’ ethical judgment of what has been previously read.

Prison Narratives: The Year in South Korea

Prison NarrativesThe Year in South Korea Heui-Yung Park (bio) One of the most significant roles that life narratives have played in South Korea has been giving voice to those who have suffered social injustice and want to be heard. Lifewriting texts often serve as trial sites outside the legal systems, where writers can tell their stories to the reader without judicial authority being present. In their prison narratives, Im Pang-gyu1 and Ch'oe Sŏ-wŏn2 both turn to autobiographical representation beyond the jurisdiction of the court to present their cases in public and to disclose the injustice that they believe they have suffered. This year's essay examines how Im's Pijŏnhyang changgisu Im Pang-gyu chasŏjŏn (2019) and Ch'oe's Na nŭn nugu in'ga: Ch'oe Sŏ-wŏn okchung hoeogi (2020) defend their writers, and try to convince others of their innocence. Im was a pro-North prisoner for more than thirty years who rejected conversion to democracy following his imprisonment during the Korean War (1950–1953). His autobiography describes how he became a ppalch'isan—a communist guerrilla—who fought against the Korean military and its allies during the war. Ch'oe, on the other hand, was accused of manipulating state affairs during the presidency of Park Geun-hye, the eighteenth president of South Korea. Telling her own story in the form of a memoir, she denies all such accusations. Im's and Ch'oe's prison narratives—in which each makes a case for themselves—show how recently published South Korean life writing has spoken for those who feel they have been mistreated, offering "a forum of judgment in which the subject may achieve a control over [their] story that [they] would not hold in court" (Gilmore 696). Outside the judicial system, Im's and Ch'oe's autobiographical representations enable them to speak for themselves, presenting their own stories that differ from what others assume they know. In so doing, their life narratives turn into alternative venues for telling the truth about themselves and seeking out justice. Examining these narratives, however, should also remind us of Paul John Eakin's proposal "to think of ethics as the deep subject of autobiographical discourse" ("Introduction" 6). Im's Pijŏnhyang changgisu works to correct the [End Page 91] stereotypical, negative views of unconverted communist prisoners—most of whom have suffered long-term imprisonment and state violence—and addresses the ethics of these laws. But Ch'oe's also raises questions about the amount of truth in the information provided to the public, and can therefore lead us to think about the ethical responsibilities of the autobiographer, and especially when demanding justice. Looking into these prison narratives sheds light on the empowering roles that life writing can offer these prisoners, and more generally, on the ethics of writing one's own life story. Unconverted Long-term Prisoners: National Heroes or Enemies? Pijŏnhyang changgisu (unconverted long-term prisoners in Korea) refers to those who have been imprisoned for an extensive period (the majority for more than thirty years) for maintaining their socialist ideology, or for participating in communist activities in South Korea since the 1945 liberation of the country. Im Pang-gyu was a communist imprisoned for twenty years (1952–1972) for his participation in a communist guerrilla unit. Five years after his release, he was reimprisoned without trial because he had refused to convert to democracy. While serving an additional twelve years (1977–1989), Im and other unconverted inmates were exposed to so-called conversion "maneuvering" imposed by the state in the form of physical abuse. Published years after Im's 1989 release, Pijŏnhyang changgisu Im Pang-gyu chasŏjŏn reveals the unfair treatment long-term prisoners like Im experienced, and also tries to change defamatory preconceptions about them by presenting their life stories. In South Korea, ppalch'isan and those with communist ideologies have aroused fear and hatred among people influenced by Cold War, anti-communist ideology. The still-famous story of nine-year-old Yi Sŭng-bok—reportedly killed in 1968 by armed North spies because he shouted "I...

Archive: Conscientious Criticism and the Panther Captivity Narrative

This essay reexamines the Panther Captivity narrative with regard to its complex textual past and the untapped potential of the archive. A few novel discoveries are presented: one full text of an edition previously recorded but unseen, four new but incomplete versions of the text derived from advertisements, and one neverbefore-referenced edition in its entirety. These initial findings indicate the wealth of potential surrounding the Panther Captivity and suggest the need for a more intentional practice of textual criticism in our field. Attending to the contingency and historicity of early American texts encourages nuance in the arguments we develop and helps us sidestep strong theories of truth and interpretation.

Two Barbary Captives: Allegiance Through Self-Interest and International Networks, 1785–1796

The correspondence and diaries of two American merchant sailors, James Cathcart and Captain Richard O'Brien, who were held captive in Algiers from 1785 to 1795–96, bridge and complicate the two literatures of commercial-diplomatic and informal networks. During this period, the nascent American government and over one hundred of its citizens were held hostage by the North African "Barbary States" of Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis. Using the letters and diaries of the two most prolific captives, Cathcart and O'Brien, this article shows that the captives successfully penetrated diplomatic networks and the minds of sympathetic diplomats such as David Humphreys, who exploited the captives' plight to help his own longstanding campaign of fostering national identity. The captives similarly deployed the pragmatic skills and style of correspondence they learned as merchant sailors to self-interestedly weave their cause for liberty into the emerging national narrative. These interventions echoed the sentiments and rhetoric of participants in Shays's Rebellion (Massachusetts, 1786–87) and the Whiskey Rebellion (western Pennsylvania, 1791–94). Yet perhaps because of the very different (and, in fact, conflicting) goals of American captives in Algiers and rebels in rural Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, the ever-increasing scholarship on American captives in Barbary has overlooked how these nonelite citizens' campaigns were intertwined. Their shared political rhetoric and notions of national identity were developed and deployed thousands of miles apart, likely thanks to their shared backgrounds in self-interested participation in the revolution and the captives' ready access to newspapers and personal correspondence that kept them informed of domestic crises on the American frontier. Literary analysis of American captives in Barbary is typically juxtaposed with Indian captivity narratives, which is especially applicable to fictional Barbary narratives, and a much smaller number of published nonfictional accounts. The comparison does not hold for the more abundant short-form correspondence, which represents a more significant and untapped opportunity for scholarly analysis of the epistolary styles of the two most prominent American captives in Algiers, who echoed and engaged with the rhetoric and ideas of rebels on the young nation's terrestrial frontier as they were being held captive on the maritime frontier. This article argues that, through the captives' political rhetoric and canny exploitation of their positions in informal transnational networks, we can gain new insights into how nonelite citizens, whether in rural Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or Algiers, drew on a shared language of liberty and expectations of popular participation in policy development to simultaneously influence the terms of national identity and reinvent themselves.

The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America by Greta LaFleur

Reviewed by: The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America by Greta LaFleur Kate Luce Mulry (bio), Jessica Choppin Roney, and Whitney Martinko Keywords Sexuality, Sexual behavior, Gender, History of sex The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America. By Greta LaFleur. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 304. Cloth $64.95, paper $34.95.) Greta LaFleur’s The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America, recently reissued in paperback, reveals how residents of the eighteenth-century British Atlantic understood human sexuality as environmentally situated. It asks how we might rethink a history of sex outside of the body and “without the subject” (189). According to LaFleur, early modern environmental understandings of sexuality emerged in natural history texts that were engaged in debates about the relationship of environment and race. While historians of race have investigated how conceptions of porous humoral bodies shaped how early modern people understood health and inchoate ideas about race, LaFleur’s novel contribution suggests that scholars interested in the history of sexuality should be similarly attentive to how sexual behavior was seen as “highly contingent on one’s environment” (34). The book is not designed to be comprehensive but instead offers new frameworks for understanding how early Americans thought about sex and sexual behaviors. By examining natural history treatises produced by elite writers as well as multiple genres of popular print material—including Barbary captivity narratives, execution narratives, cross-dressing narratives, and anti-vice narratives in the study—LaFleur uncovers a range of writers who charted how the environment shaped human bodies and behaviors. Efforts to comprehend human difference mattered a great deal to natural philosophers, governments, colonists, and merchants during a long [End Page 651] eighteenth century of accelerated globalization and colonization. As early modern authors struggled to articulate the nature of “human variety,” their efforts regularly rested on assertions about the sexual practices of the people they described and they “began to scrutinize sexual behavior as something of a racial symptom” (6). Early modern people understood both race and sexuality as malleable features of humoral bodies that were “vulnerable” (6) to the environment. While various scholars have analyzed colonizers’ anxieties about their bodies when consuming novel foods in new colonial climates, LaFleur instead delves into how these humoralist or environmentalist beliefs also informed eighteenth-century understandings of sexual behavior.1 In doing so, LaFleur reframes scholarship on early sex by moving it away from an exclusive focus on the body. While the structure of the book is roughly chronological, the thematic structure of each chapter facilitates LaFleur’s close and incisive readings. She demonstrates that writers contributed to tangled histories of race and sex across multiple print genres, and in doing so, LaFleur “unit[es] the archives of popular narrative and natural history” (5). By investigating varied texts, LaFleur brings out the mutually imbricated and influential connection between genres and reveals an Atlantic conversation about sexuality, race, and the environment. LaFleur’s book will likely introduce to scholars to an unexpected archive by revealing the numerous popular print sources that incorporated naturalists’ investigations into the nature of human variety. If eighteenth-century science writing became a vehicle for ideas about racial difference, these lesser-known texts offer additional rich resources for investigating how writers articulated human difference through claims about sexual behavior. Indeed, the non-elite vernacular literature of the era asks many of the “same questions” (23) as authors of natural history treatises. [End Page 652] After an introduction that clearly defines the terms and parameters of the work, the first chapter, “The Natural History of Sexuality,” acquaints her readers with an array of natural history texts composed by elite authors such as Cotton Mather, Carolus Linnaeus, the Comte de Buffon, and Thomas Jefferson. These authors articulated human difference through race and sex. The “environmental logic” (6) that underpinned their claims about race similarly underpinned their claims about sex. The second chapter, “The Complexion of Sodomy,” tracks a trope that appeared consistently in Barbary captivity narratives, in which sailors within the British Empire expressed fears about what Muslims might do to their endangered and vulnerable Christian bodies and their writings “turned to the figure of sodomy to stage their concerns about...

Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec III

Reviewed by: Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States by David J. Dzurec III Sarah Sillin (bio) Our Suffering Brethren: Foreign Captivity and Nationalism in the Early United States david j. dzurec iii University of Massachusetts Press, 2019 236 pp. David J. Dzurec III's Our Suffering Brethren traces a history of white American captivity from the American Revolution to the end of the Barbary War. Throughout this era, the British navy and Barbary corsairs repeatedly captured American ships—whether to impress, imprison, ransom, or enslave those aboard—thereby evoking a sense of American vulnerability (7). Dzurec's history demonstrates that captivity profoundly influenced early US politics by eliciting widespread public concern; it thereby became a source of nationalism that served complex, sometimes contradictory interests. Americans' loss of freedom offered a key justification first for the Revolutionaries' cause and then for a stronger federal government. Yet rather than simply unifying the country, captivity became the subject of fierce political debates. Indeed, Dzurec argues that Federalists' and Republicans' responses established a key pattern in US politics: each party asserted its unique ability to provide national security, even as both invoked the same nationalist rhetoric by playing on fear of a foreign threat (194). In examining such rhetoric, Dzurec develops a nuanced reading of how international encounters shaped the government's relation to citizens. Federalists and Republicans alike located political capital in American captives' suffering, as they claimed authority to enter into new wars, negotiate for US captives, or forge treaties. But even as politicians played on voters' anxieties, he suggests, so too did public discourse inform US politics. The apparent arbitrariness of captivity, which elicited concerns that "any American could be taken captive," also thereby fostered a sense that "any American could join the debate about the nature of Independence" (38). Though the nation's early presidents responded to this sentiment with [End Page 300] calls for limiting public involvement—like the private fundraising efforts to redeem Americans captive in Algeria—public opinion and political policies continued to shape one another. To understand the reciprocal influence of public opinion and political rhetoric, Dzurec explores a rich historical archive. His readings of sailors' letters and narratives (with particular attention to Ethan Allen's and John Dodge's memoirs) highlight the influential role of their accounts in circulating news of captivity and shaping Americans' impressions of these events. Moreover, he delves into Americans' responses to such accounts by analyzing the more official discourse of political policies and representatives' correspondence, alongside public commentary in news editorials, plays, and printed accounts of local festivities. Together, these texts allow him to argue that politicians' and private citizens' responses informed one another, while considering how they shifted over time. Captivity became first a touchstone in arguments for American independence and confederation in the late eighteenth century and then a lightning rod in early nineteenth-century political debates as the Federalist and Republican parties both purported to be the party of national security. Dzurec moves chronologically, so that the first half of Our Suffering Brethren identifies how captivity fostered American nationalism, starting with British impressment. Of course, captivity was not a new experience or trope; rather, Dzurec contends, colonial-era captivity narratives provided revolutionaries with "a historical precedent for the type of threat they faced" (37). Moreover, he suggests that stories of captivity became a means for revolutionaries to claim sympathy. Yet rather than halt captivity, the end of the war left Americans unprotected by British treaties with Barbary states. When Algerian corsairs captured American merchant ships in 1785, captivity took on new importance in US politics by fostering interest in a stronger federal government. Even as Americans' captivity strengthened arguments for the federal government, though, it also raised new possibilities for individual Americans to participate in foreign relations. Dzurec explores how such private involvement ebbed and flowed. In the 1780s, Americans began fundraising to help ransom their countrymen, then paused this involvement when the Constitutional Convention afforded the government more power to act on their behalf. Although Washington and the Federalists believed "public sentiment ought not play a role in politics outside of election" (63), the [End Page 301] formation of Democratic...

Defoe’s Unchristian Colonel: Captivity Narratives and Resistance to Conversion

Daniel Defoe’s fictional autobiographies often contain a puritanical conversion narrative, but Colonel Jack’s narrator is unique in his problematized relationship to Christian conversion. Alert to the negative implications of mercenary conversion, Defoe presents in Colonel Jack a hero who not only revels in his complex ploys to evade the law, but explicitly rejects conversion to Christianity at several points in the narrative. By reading Colonel Jack alongside narratives of European enslavement and incarceration, I suggest that in this text Defoe deliberately reproduces the form of the popular Barbary captivity narrative. This subgenre of narrative portrays conversion as a force to be resisted, informs Jack’s reluctance to embrace Christianity, and ultimately suggests that living in a Christian nation may actually be a hindrance to conversion, making Catholic South America a milieu more conducive to the protagonist’s religious transformation than Protestant Virginia.

"Nothing which hunger will not devour": Disgust and Sustenance in the Northeastern Borderlands

In the borderlands of northeastern North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hunger forced colonists and Native Americans to eat substances they found disgusting. This article reads captivity narratives and missionary accounts to argue that disgust fundamentally tested, transgressed, and reified cultural boundaries in the borderlands, while shaping the archive of early American foodways. In doing so, this article historicizes the concept of disgust and its formation in early America, and examines how colonial disgust formed perceptions of Indigenous food supplies. English and French settlers recorded their disgust with Indian food and claimed that Indigenous people could not even conceptualize disgust. The rhetorical aims of this literature of disgust shaped the colonial written archive, which records far fewer incidences of Native disgust. Nevertheless, these same sources document Native experiences of revulsion at colonial foodways and the foodways of other Native nations, which complicate the colonial narrative of the absence of Indian revulsion. A case study of fermentation and decay in Native and colonial foodways demonstrates that colonists saw Native fermented foods as rotten and thereby understated Native Americans' food supplies, contributing to an imperial discourse on Indigenous "poverty," food systems, and land use that sought to justify colonialism.

Survival and Resistance in Alicia Kozameh's Steps under Water (1996) and Malika Oufkir's Stolen Lives (1999)

Political prison narratives express an extremely delicate and totally distinctive experience that has an unforgettable effect on the heart. Yenna Wu defines political prisoners as the prisoners who are incarcerated due to their active and passive involvement in political [and] prisoners of conscience associated with non-political activities (Introduction 1). Political prisoners' mechanisms of resistance and strategies of survival differ from one to another, yet they exhibit some affinities because of the remarkable commonalities of global political prison experience. The aim of this paper is to present a comparison of the aesthetics of resistance and survival employed by female political prisoners as presented in Malika Oufkir's Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail (1999) and Alicia Kozameh's Steps under Water (1996). To investigate the ways in which female political prisoners maintain their sanity and humanity, this paper is based on Elaine Scarry's analysis of torture and Judith Herman's study of trauma.

“Look’d Like Milk”: Colonialism and Infant Feeding in the English Atlantic World

Abstract While wet nursing interactions between enslaved women of African descent and colonial women have received extensive scholarly attention, much remains to be done in understanding colonial and Native women’s interactions around breastfeeding and infant feeding. This article close-reads two captivity narratives in which baby food features prominently: God’s Protecting Providence, Jonathan Dickinson’s 1699 narrative of being shipwrecked among Ais, Jeaga, Jobé, Santaluces, and Surruque Indians in coastal Florida in 1696; and God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty, Elizabeth Hanson’s 1728 narrative of being captured by Wabanaki people during Dummer’s War in 1724. Captivity rendered the colonists dependent upon intimate Native care for the survival of their children. When Dickinson and Hanson crafted their narratives of their captivities, however, they sought to reinscribe colonial supremacy after experiences that called it into question. The complexities of colonial-Native interactions around infant feeding in these sources demonstrate the need for further scholarship on reproduction and settler colonialism.

Cartographic Intertextuality: Reading The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson with Geographic Information Systems

The Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson from 1682 is not only famous – or infamous – for its brutal descriptions of the armed conflicts of King Philip’s War, it is also a colonial document that contains both religious as well as spatial representations of Native American territories. This article proposes to analyze this entanglement of space and text with a combination of digital text analysis tools and geographic information systems (GIS). Applying the potentials of such technologies and methods to the study of captivity narratives like Mary Rowlandson’s opens up new opportunities to better understand the interaction of writing and space in colonial New England.