Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 283 Colombian Departments even in the present. During this period, the Department of Caldas was created and played a central role as its coffee industry boomed, with the resulting economic, political and cultural implications. The final section deals more directly with the establishment of a collective identity in Rio Sucio and San Lorenzo in which intellectuals constructed a local historical mythology which challenged the "hegemonic myth of white Caldas" and how that construction affected indigenous inhabitants diroughout their history. The author argues that the "country of regions " construction of Colombian national geography is both historically and racially manifested due to a racialization of progress which privileged racial homogeneity and whiteness, as well as focusing on a geographical interpretation of nation development. This interpretation needs to be reassessed and is challenged by attempts by indigenous Colombians to negotiate a space for themselves by redefining Colombia as a racially plural nation whose regions have been defined as much racially as politically and geographically. The book also includes extensive notes (over 45 pages) and bibliography (an additional 20 pages) and is an invaluable resource for understanding the extremely complex and contested racial and regional communities of Colombia. Julie Lirot University of Nevada, Las Vegas Cervantes in Algiers: A Captive's Tale Vanderbilt University Press, 2002 By MarÃ-a Antonia Garcés It is a rare occurrence when academic writing produces the uncanny sensation that its author is so in touch with her object of analysis that she has achieved a communion across the centuries . This is precisely the "reality effect" produced by MarÃ-a Antonia Garcés in her new study of Cervantes. Drawing in part on her own experience of captivity, Garcés reaches deep inro the material and discursive reality of early modern Mediterranean culture and virtually channels the creator of Don Quixote. In the process, she delivers an original and diought-provoking interpretation of Cervantes's entire literary career. At the heart of this seminal rereading of our most canonical author is the proposition that the trauma produced by Cervantes's five years of captivity in North Africa marked the origin of a life long series of "working off" mechanisms that rendered not only psychic healing but also an increasingly complex genealogy of textualized reenactments . In effect, every moment in Cervantes's literary production that invokes imprisonment— from the early testimonial play Eltrato deArgelto "La historia del cautivo" in die Quixote to the opening scene of Persiks y Sigismunda—is "the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in an attempt to express an indescribable reality" (238). The theoretical frame for Garcés's intervention is outlined in the "Introduction." Here, the post-Holocaust writings of Primo Levi and Jacques Lacan's readings of Freud are linked to Antonio de Sosas Topographia, e historia generaldeArgel(1612). Wrongly attributed for centuries to Diego de Haedo, the Topographia was composed by Sosa, a Portuguese cleric captured by pirates in 1577. Sosa will play a pivotal role in Garcés's study because his account of Algiers in the late sixteenth century is one of the few contemporary sources for information about Christian captives in general and Cervantes in particular . I will have more to say below about the function of Sosas text in Garcés's analysis. Chapter one, "The Barbary Corsairs," affords the reader the multi-layered contextualization needed to understand Cervantes's universe between 1575 and 1580 when he was held captive . Garcés gracefully oudines not only the traffic in hostages that drove the economy of Algiers but also relations between the Ottoman Turks and the North African city-states, the rise of Algiers under the regime of the feared Barbarossa brothers, and their rivalry with Spain and the Christian world. In addition, she describes the conditions suffered by captives in bs baños (prisons), the temptation to renegarse (convert to Islam), and the four escape attempts masterminded by Cervantes. Chapter two continues rhe historical reconstruction of Algerian society in order to, as Garcés 284 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies puts it, "evoke the situation of elite (ransomable) Christian captives in Algiers in the 1570s, to conjure up...