Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century (review)

Captivating Subjects: Writing Confinement, Citizenship, and Nationhood in the Nineteenth Century is a collection of essays about discourses of 'various forms of captivity' in the nineteenth century. The volume is divided into three sections: 'The Subject of Captivity,' 'Captivating Discourses: Class and Nation,' and 'Captivating Otherness.' Texts under consideration include Russian serf narratives, American slave narratives, Barbary captivity texts, and prison narratives written by prisoners and wardens in the United States, England, and Ireland.

Many of the individual essays in the volume are interesting, informative, and represent important works of scholarship. Jason Haslam's examination of the prison narrative of suffragette Lady Constance Lytton, for example, is careful, compelling, and well informed by the existing scholarship; he traces Lytton's complex attempts to 'transmute her privileged individual identity into membership in the suffragette collective identity.' John MacKay's consideration of the rhetorical strategies employed by writers in the genre of Russian serf narratives to establish a voice and identity is similarly rich. This essay draws explicit contrasts between the serf narrative and the slave narrative, noting in particular the turn for the serf away from religion (in contrast to slave narratives) and towards 'the myth of the Tsar' as father/protector; the essay also explores the rhetorical manipulation of the Other (Jews, Muslims) as alien, non-Russian, in order to solidify for the serf his Russian identity. Also notable is Frank Lauterbach's interesting if less surprising discussion of the prison in late Victorian discourse as 'an emblematic, totemic boundary between respectability and "savage" forms of criminality ... expressed through the notion of class.' For the largely 'gentleman writers' who form the subject of this essay, what is central is not a concern with the reality or abuses of the prison but the need to dissociate from the ethically unacceptable, socially different, and racially disparate populations that form the criminal subculture. The prison can 'emblematically be used both to accept the existence of this subculture and to displace it: criminals were literally and rhetorically contained in prisons in a way that allowed them to serve, to be colonized, and to be repressed as a social and moral Other.' One of the most compelling essays in the volume is Jennifer Costello Brezina's exploration of the narratives of Barbary captives, white Americans captured into slavery in North Africa. Brezina argues that these narratives allow the new United States nation to define itself 'through conflicts with an Orientalized Other' and through narratives of 'captivity and insurrection' which, unlike Indian captivity narratives, 'lay the imaginative groundwork of nation-building.' This essay also persuasively pushes readers to reflect on why these Barbary captivity narratives, unlike the Indian captivity narratives that now form a central place in the classic American historical/literary narrative, 'have been mostly forgotten.'

If many of the individual essays are satisfying, the organization and rationale of the volume is somewhat less so. As the editors explain, the 'trajectory from section to section is thus not historical, but telescopes outward, from an emphasis on identifying the writing subject by gender, class, and race, to identifying groups within the nation by class or political affiliation, to classifying nations within an international (and orientalist) framework.' Since many of the writers under consideration engage and blur these identities and classifications, this rationale for the trajectory of the volume feels illusory. At the same time, the editors provide no explanation for why certain texts and authors deserve a place in the volume. Olaudah Equiano's Narrative is the only slave narrative to receive sustained attention, and neither the author of the essay on Equiano nor the volume editors make the case that his eighteenth-century slave narrative should be considered as representative. More broadly, and notwithstanding the accomplishments of some of the individual essays, the volume as a whole doesn't achieve the major and perhaps overly ambitious claim advanced in the introduction: that it sheds 'new light on...