Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation (review)

Captivity narratives are tricky texts. On the one hand, they purport to convey a direct and deeply personal relation of the captive's unexpected and often disorienting experiences among her captors. On the other hand, the texts often draw, sometimes heavily, from previous published accounts, biblical typology, ministerial discourse, and propaganda tracts, making it hard to distinguish "personal experience" from cultural commonplaces. While captivity narratives suggest an immediate relation of historical events, then, they simultaneously bury their own textual history, submerging their influences, predecessors, and coauthors beneath the foundations of a fictionally autonomous narrating "I." Captivity narratives, furthermore, offer peepholes into cultures perceived as "other," informing those in the captives' "home" cultures of exotic practices and manners, of unchartered terrains. On the other hand, the "exoticism" of the narratives is always produced within a framework of the familiar: building upon the stereotypes and preconceptions of her home culture, the captive reproduces, even as she transgresses, the expected codes of alterity. Captivity narratives are, furthermore, documents of astonishing individual agency, testimonials not only to a captive's ability to withstand often bitter ordeals using her intellectual and spiritual resources, but also to ruminate upon her experiences in often surprisingly imaginative ways. Yet no captivity is, finally, an individual experience. Despite her strengths, no captive survives by her wits alone, but must comprehend and assimilate the cultural codes of her captors, as well as those technologies of reincorporation (the sermon, the xenophobic stereotype) that will allow her to "return" home, if she (or God or the Army or John Wayne) so chooses. Finally, captivity narratives, even as they are documents that argue for the inviolable integrity of the captive's body and spirit, seem to force readers-at least late-twentieth-century academic ones-to anatomize and prioritize the captive's experience in sometimes tortuous ways, using the gendered experiences of captives to explain the colonial racial history that is the text's "real" ideological concern, or vice versa, distinguishing the various splintered or-more often, these days-hybridized voices with which the captive speaks, and so on.

Many of these contradictions in the captivity genre are contained, implicitly, in the apparently paradoxical title of Rebecca Blevins Faery's study, Cartographies of Desire. Cartography studies the tropology of maps, a genre that, not unlike captivity narratives, takes readers into new and previously unknown territories through a series of familiar and often-encountered codes. Maps, in other words, reaffirm our familiarity with the predictable in order to give us an (illusory) entrance into the unknown. Desire, on the other hand, transforms familiar objects (people, commodities, romance plots, erotic codes) into forms that are exciting precisely to the degree that they break free from conventional settings. While maps rely on generalities (deviations in a landscape are subordinated to the "general" characteristic of a terrain), desire relies on the return of generalities to the quirkiness of a gesture, an affect, or a scenario. To shape a cartography of desire, then, would be to take what is most unexpected, most imaginative, and most disunifying, and return it to the codes and tropologies of the familiar. It is, in fact, to reproduce the captivity narrative.

Cartographies of Desire explores the stories of Mary White Rowlandson and of Pocahontas, two figures never before explored at such length in proximity. Narragansett Indians took Rowlandson captive from Lancaster, Massachusetts, in 1675, and held her for 11 weeks before she was "redeemed." Her 1682 narrative, framed by a preface by Increase Mather and a sermon by her husband, the minister Joseph Rowlandson, has become a touchstone for studies of early American ideologies of race, gender, sexuality, authorship, spirituality, and nationalism. Pocahontas was held captive for three years by the English at Jamestown, Virginia, to protect the settlement from attack by her father, Wahunsonacock, and his Powhatan warriors. Eventually married to John Rolfe, converted to Christianity, and taken to England, Rebecca Rolfe...