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

Many former captives wrote Indian captivity narratives to assert their belonging to the settler societies into which they were trying to re-integrate themselves. Andrew Newman’s Allegories of Encounter shows that reading played a similar social role during captivity, allowing captives to reconstruct discursive communal ties that approximated those their captors had severed. By reading books and other texts in captivity, captives could anticipate the reunification that writing would eventually confirm. Newman analyzes a broad range of “literacy practices” in numerous captivity narratives, extending literacy’s centrality to settler colonialism beyond its familiar uses in land acquisition and the civilizing mission. If settler colonialism reproduces metropolitan sociopolitical settings, literacy bolstered captives’ faith in this reproduction as captivity threatened to frustrate it. Captors unversed in alphabetic literacy recognized and often respected its significance for captive settlers to whom they gave books and whose engagements in literacy practices they often accepted. By contrast, captives utilized literacy as the major means for distinguishing their historical positions and sociopolitical affiliations from those into which captivity had forced them.

The book revises conventional treatments of literary allusions and intertextual references in Indian captivity narratives as extradiegetic afterthoughts or merely decorative tropes. It develops an intertextual history in which reading and the meanings with which readers invest texts become constitutive elements of captivity narratives’ plots rather than sources of stylistic rhetorical effects. Drawing on sociolinguistics and academic literacy studies, Allegories of Encounter explores various “literacy events” that enabled captives to perform “their participation in [the] discourse communities” from which their captors had separated them (3). The book’s “mode of inquiry” is deliberately “inductive, speculative, associative, [and] slow” as Newman traces what literacy might have meant for captives, its significance within its various discursive, cultural, and historical contexts, and its functions in shaping captivity experiences (194, original emphasis). The book expands the range of activities and capabilities included under the term literacy as well as Indian captivity narratives’ social investments and functions. This book history study reconstructs the discursive communities that settlers have created with literacy’s aid, analyzing the texts they read and sometimes wrote in captivity, and imaginatively re-creating the worlds that literacy brought into being.

The first chapter, “Rowlandson’s Captivity, Interpreted by God,” analyzes the Bible’s role in the genre’s hypercanonized text, Mary Rowland-son’s The Soveraignty and Goodness of God (1682). Scholars have distinguished Rowlandson’s narrated experiences from the numerous biblical citations in her book, at times crediting Increase Mather’s editorial intervention for these allusions. Newman argues that multiple intimacies and dependencies tie these biblical allusions inextricably to Rowlandson’s experiences. In “Rowlandson’s rendering,” he states, “the provision of a Bible” by one of her captors “was an experience” that “enabled” a “series of literacy events” that were as experiential even though they were anchored in specific biblical verses rather than in the particular geographic places she traveled (20–21). The dynamic interactions that settlers created to link textual passages to captivity’s locales subordinated the latter to the former.

Chapter 2, “Psalm 137 as a Site of Encounter,” extends this analysis to various authors who used this seminal representation of the Israelites’ Babylonian exile as the definitive experiential axis of their own captivities. Newman argues that “[h]istorically, culturally, geographically, the circumstances of Christian captives in the Eastern Woodlands correspond to the language of the psalm so closely as to entail a partial collapse in the structure of the allegory between the biblical narrative and their own experience” (51). Rather than keeping those levels distinct, Newman suggests that Christian captives had to collapse them because the “first three verses of Psalm 137 conformed so closely to the circumstances of American captivity narratives” (60). The recurring adverbial phrase “so closely” emphasizes literacy’s potent ability to blur these boundaries. Newman subtly critiques settlers’ typological identification with biblical Israelites by acknowledging that “perhaps no...