Renegades from Barbary: The Transnational Turn in Captivity Studies

At least one thing, I think, sets us apart from colleagues in other fields of academia: specialists in American literature are not shy about questioning the premises of their discipline. A prominent scholar in our field opens her latest book by asking: “what does it mean to set aside a body of writing as ‘American’? What assumptions enable us to take an adjective derived from a territorial jurisdiction and turn it into a mode of literary causality?” In using “the adjective ‘American’ as a literary epithet,” Wai-Chee Dimock declares, “we limit ourselves, with or without explicit acknowledgement, to an analytic domain foreclosed by definition, a kind of scholarly unilateralism” (3). Observing the trends of globalization and transnationalism, and listening to scholars and pundits who predict the decline or end of the nation-state, Dimock and other Americanists perceive challenges to their methodology, and thus presumably to their departments and programs. Paul Giles writes, “in relation to the study of American literature and culture . . . since about 1980 the rules of engagement have changed so significantly that old area studies nostrums about exceptionalist forms of national politics and culture, pieties about American diversity or whatever, have become almost irrelevant” (50).

Of course Giles and Dimock adopt these apocalyptic tones as a rhetorical strategy—they in fact are eager to construct new paradigms for American studies: multilingual, comparative, deterritorial, and transnational. The term “transnational,” like “hybrid,” is among the most popular buzzwords in current critical discourse. I will use the term to describe relationships that connect persons of a given ethnic or national identity dispersed across multiple national boundaries. Transnational identities, like cultural diasporas, exist in tension with nationalisms, and these tensions have increased with the growth of electronic communications, capital flows, international air travel, and most of all, I would argue, migrant labor. In the last three decades an entire urban nation, Dubai, UAE, has been built on the shore of the Persian Gulf by the hands of laborers who are not citizens of that nation. At the same time other nations have come to rely for a large portion of their gross domestic product on wire transfers from citizens working abroad. The lives of many of these workers, who live away from their families for months or years at a time, are grim indeed. The US’s self-image as “a nation of immigrants” celebrates the plucky heroism of earlier generations who left poor, despotic, war-torn, or overcrowded places for America. We tell our schoolchildren that these immigrants found freedom and opportunity in America, but in fact many immigrants to colonial America were captives. Not only slaves from Africa who endured the middle passage, but also indentured servants and criminal transportees such as those brought to Virginia and Louisiana in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today as well, far too many immigrant laborers are captives smuggled into sweatshops, or sex workers, or invisible domestic servants. Migration too often is not a quest for prosperity and opportunity, but a form of captivity.

I wish to focus this essay on transnationalism in early American literary studies around recent scholarship on captivity narratives, for three reasons, as follows.

First, because the captivity narrative genre played a key role in some of the exceptionalist genealogies of American literature from which Dimock and Giles now wish to distance themselves. For Roy Harvey Pearce, Richard Slotkin, and Annette Kolodny, the stories of English colonials captured by American Indians profoundly shaped the myths of the frontier and the young nation, and courses, anthologies, and scholarship on captivity narratives have formed a subfield in American literature since the 1970s.

Second, because revisionist accounts of the American captivity genre, critiques of Slotkin and Kolodny’s work, for example, have not been where the field has gone in the last decade. Instead, we have seen a shift toward the narratives of captivity in North Africa or “Barbary.” The first and second Iraq Wars and the preoccupation of US foreign policy with radical Islam since 11 September 2001 have inspired academics and the wider public to study the roots of the conflict between Christians...