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American Literary History 16.3 (2004) 407-436



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Slaves in Algiers:

Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage

1. Introduction: Early American Literature and the Global Market

The prologue to Susanna Rowson's 1794 play Slaves in Algiers announces that, "tho' a woman," Rowson will "plead the rights of man" (9).1 Her play, first staged at the Chestnut Street Theater in Philadelphia, explicitly argues for the inclusion of women as rights-bearing subjects in the new nation. Yet given her announced focus on political subjectivity in the US, it is striking that the entirety of the play takes place on North African, rather than North American, soil. Rowson's play thus turns to a distinctly global geography to establish the terms of national political identity. Indeed, her play—which takes as its topic the plight of white Americans held as slaves by Algerians (or "Barbary pirates") in the 1790s—might be seen as a hawkish dramatic preamble to the Tripolitan War of 1801-05, a war that marked the US's military debut as a global, naval power.2 In what follows, I argue that Rowson's attempt to transgender freedom in the new nation is intimately related to a set of global relations that are too often seen as irrelevant to early American literature. Moreover, while globalization is the oft-cited paradigm of the current moment—a paradigm understood to denote the move toward a postnational geopolitical organization—I argue that earlier historical modes of globalization are closely associated with nationalist development rather than antithetical or irrelevant to it.3 Literary criticism has tended to locate the origins of American literature in an Emersonian severing of ties with Europe and the cultivation of indigenous production within an enclosed American field, yet Rowson's play reveals an early national culture operating within a set of global relations and indicates the way in which the "national" imaginary depends upon peoples beyond the enclosure it seeks to make immanent. [End Page 407]

In the reading of Rowson's play and the first American "hostage crisis" of the 1790s that follows, I pursue two broadly interrelated claims: first, that race emerges as an aspect of gender construction within republican and nationalist politics in the early US and, second, that the creation of new forms of nationalized (and racialized) identity occurs in a global-transatlantic context rather than a solely national one. The early national period is typically described in terms of the growing factional division between Federalists and Republicans that pitted a vision of a strong national government ruled by a social and economic elite against the Jeffersonian-Republican ideal of state- centered, agrarian democracy. Yet, as Rogers Smith has argued, much of the vitriolic debate between Federalists and Republicans concerns not just federal versus state authority but rather the pressing question of how to configure terms of belonging in the new nation ("Constructing" 20). Struggles to define who constituted "the people" motivated much of the political debate of the 1790s, including immigration and naturalization policy, debates over laws concerning expatriation, shifts in franchise eligibility, and the controversial Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. Moreover, citizenship began to be increasingly cast in terms of race, gender, and natality during this period—namely in ascriptive or inflexible terms that identified individuals in relation to apparently immutable characteristics: "Ascriptive versions of 'Americanism' offered a more compelling sense of common identity than secularized, deracinated conceptions of American political communities as merely the contingent creations of people attracted to liberal republicanism" (Smith, "Constructing" 20-21). As Smith suggests, racialization in this period is less aimed at identifying the Other as different and therefore undesirable than at creating a broad national coherence out of a group of individuals with primarily local attachments.4

In the midst of the debates between Federalists and Republicans, an enormous amount of public attention turned to the Barbary captivity crisis in which more than 100 American sailors were captured by Algerian corsairs in 1793 (Wilson 140).5 While the fledgling federal government deliberated as to how...

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