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

In Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic: Circulation of Knowledge and Authority in the Iberian and English Imperial Worlds, Lisa Voigt examines Spanish, Portuguese, and English captivity narratives produced across the Atlantic world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She examines how captivity narratives inform knowledge production in and about the Americas with an emphasis on the ways captivity narratives contribute explicit and implicit knowledge about the persons writing and being written about.

The book’s nuanced, detailed analyses avoid offering too simple an argument and instead advance several significant contributions to early American and early modern studies. In the book, Voigt explicates how captivity narratives contribute to and are informed by other literary forms developing at the time, particularly the novel and political tract. Furthermore, her analyses of authors’ and captives’ relationships to imperial power urge us to reconsider the transgressiveness often ascribed to the hybridity and transculturation seen in captivity narratives, suggesting they may be less resistant to imperialism than standard postcolonial critiques acknowledge. Overall, Writing Captivity’s strengths result from the author’s broad and precise knowledge of primary sources in three languages, many of which have been until now understudied, and her ability to sustain analysis not through but with the contradictions and reiterations that mark captivity narratives in the early modern period. The book’s analysis beyond traditional national or linguistic boundaries exemplifies the best potential for transnational approaches: rather than merely compare texts based on similarities, Voigt forges a deep and therefore more accurate reading of the texts in their material and discursive contexts.

Writing Captivity is composed of a series of readings, with each chapter centered on a text that allows Voigt the opportunity to meditate on the interconnected but necessarily distinct dimensions of transatlantic captivity narratives. She begins with narratives of Algerian captivity and ends with English writing about captivity in the Americas. At the book’s core are readings of three Iberian captivity narratives that alternately engage with captivity as the locus of interpretation, critique, and heroics. For example, by beginning with narratives of captivity in North Africa and Turkey, she asserts the influence of these narratives on later New World narratives, reminding readers that the depictions of the “foreign” began with Spain’s proximity to Islamic culture. The chapter calls attention to mutual influences between captivity narratives in the Mediterranean and New World, highlighting as examples the concordances between Diego de Haedo’s narrative of Algierian captivity, Topographica e historia general de Argel (1612), and later narratives such as Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s Los trabajos de Persiles y Sigismunda: Historia setentional (1617). This organization reflects Voigt’s purpose of looking at captivity narratives in circulation: her conclusions about captivity narratives and knowledge in early modern Europe and the Americas rely on careful interpretation of the texts and their reception and influence.

At its core, Writing Captivity offers engaging, detailed, and materially situated examinations of relatively understudied texts such as el Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s La Florida del Inca, Francisco Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán’s Cautiverio feliz y razón individual de las guerras delatadas del reino de Chile, and José de Santa Rita Durão’s Caramuru. In each of these readings, Voigt focuses on the ways captivity develops a subject’s experiential knowledge and the ways the knowledge is delivered in the text. That each captive’s experience is different is important to Voigt’s overall intention in the book: Garcilaso’s La Florida is a “narrative of double-crossing: a transatlantic round-trip and a duplicitous revenge” while Cautiverio feliz meditates on “the transformative effect of cross-cultural experience on the captive” (99, 167). With the exception of the final chapter, Writing Captivity focuses on Spanish and Portuguese captivity narratives written by Europeans and European-Americans who...