Ethnogenesis and Captivity: Structuring Transatlantic Difference
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
ETHNOGENESIS AND CAPTIVITY: STRUCTURING TRANSATLANTIC DIFFERENCE IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC, 1776-1823 M. Omar Siddiqi Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2013 APPROVED: D. Harland Hagler, Major Professor Clark A. Pomerleau, Committee Member Guy Chet, Committee Member Richard B. McCaslin, Chair of the Department of History Mark Wardell, Dean of the Toulouse Graduate School Siddiqi, M. Omar. Ethnogenesis and Captivity: Structuring Transatlantic Difference in the Early Republic, 1776-1823. Master of Arts (History), August 2013, 158 pp., bibliography, 185 titles. This study seeks to understand the development of early American ideas of race, religion, and gender as reflected in Indian and Barbary captivity narratives (tales of individuals taken captive by privateers in North Africa) and in plays that take American captives as their subject. Writers of both Indian and Barbary captivity narratives used racial and religious language – references to Indians and North Africans as demonic, physically monstrous, and animal – simultaneously to delineate Native American and North African otherness. The narrative writers reserved particular scorn for the figure of the Renegade – the willful cultural convert who chose to live among the Native Americans or adopt Islam and live among his North African captors. The narratives, too, reflect Early American gendered norms by defining the role of men as heads of household and women’s protectors, and by defining women by their status as dutiful wives and mothers. Furthermore, the narratives carefully treat the figure of the female captive with particular care – resisting implications of captive rape, even while describing graphic scenes of physical torture, and denying the possibility of willful transcultural sexual relationships. Copyright 2013 by M. Omar Siddiqi ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe thanks to so many people for the successful completion of this project. First and foremost, I am grateful for the support and guidance I received from my committee chair, Dr. Harland Hagler. I owe a debt of gratitude to the other members of my thesis committee, Dr. Clark Pomerleau, and Dr. Guy Chet. Furthermore, I would like to thank my wonderful fellow students at the University of North Texas History Department for their help, good cheer, and wonderful company. Finally, much appreciation is due to my parents and the Siddiqi Endowment for the Humanities, for their continued and generous support. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................... 1 THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF CAPTIVITY AND THE RELEVANCE OF ETHNOGENESIS .......................... 8 The Historiography of the Indian Captivity Narrative......................................................... 8 The Historiography of Barbary Captivity .......................................................................... 37 Ethnogenesis and the Captivity Narrative ........................................................................ 50 DEMONIC, MONSTROUS, ANIMAL, AND RENEGADE: STRUCTURES OF DIFFERENCE WITHIN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES ................................................................................................................ 54 Ethnogenesis and Race/Religion ....................................................................................... 57 Indian and Ottoman as Common Terms of Reference ..................................................... 60 Savage Arabs ..................................................................................................................... 63 Demonic Characterization of Indian Captivity Rituals ...................................................... 66 Physical Appearance as a Manifestation of the Demonic in Indian and Barbary Narratives .......................................................................................................................... 78 Native Americans and North Africans as Metaphorical Animals ...................................... 84 The Problem of the Renegade .......................................................................................... 90 DOMESTICITY AND GENDER IN BARBARY AND INDIAN CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES ......................... 96 Gender and Ethnogenesis ................................................................................................. 98 Domesticity in Indian Captivity Tales ................................................................................ 99 White Men, White Women and Barbary Captivity ......................................................... 106 Torture, Bondage, and the Vulnerable Female Body ..................................................... 109 Sexual Compromise, and the impermissibility of Transculturation ............................... 112 STAGING BARBARY CAPTIVITY: AMERICAN IMPERIAL DESIRE AND TRANSCULTURAL FEARS IN THREE EARLY AMERICAN PLAYS ................................................................................................. 118 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................... 138 BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................................................................ 144 iv INTRODUCTION This study seeks to understand the development of early American ideas of race, religion, and gender as reflected in captivity narratives. The work presented here extends earlier studies that limited their analysis of captivity narratives thematically or geographically by assessing only race or religion while using only Indian or Barbary captivity narratives, not both. This study differs from past analyses in another important respect. Using the theoretical lens of ethnogenesis – the process by which a nation or people builds a common identity through a “complex of myths and symbols, with its attendant set of life-style images and narratives” 1 – this study considers captivity narratives within an overarching theoretical framework. Broadly speaking, ethnogenesis is an intellectual framework largely contained within the realms of sociology, archaeology, and anthropology. Scholars within these disciplines use the concept to categorize the development of in-group cohesion, often in the face of multifarious, competing ethnic identities within a given geographical location.2 Ethnogenesis as an analytical tool is appropriate to the study of captivity narratives as the individuals involved directly in captivity - as well as those who were writing narratives of captivity (not often the same people) - had to grapple with what it meant to be an American in a turbulent world where the exercise of power over mind and body was not limited to one nation, race, or religion. 1 Eric Kaufmann, "American Exceptionalism Reconsidered: Anglo-Saxon Ethnogenesis in the "Universal" Nation, 1776-1850," Journal of American Studies 33, no. 3 (1999): 437. 2 See for example, James Sidbury and Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, "Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic," William and Mary Quarterly 68, no. 2 (2011): 181-208. In this article, the authors address ethnogenesis as it relates to creolization and the multi-cultural environment of the Americas induced by the trans-Atlantic slave trade. 1 Properly understanding captivity narratives and the process of ethnogenesis in the new American republic requires situating the phenomenon of captivity and its attendant narratives in a truly global context. In order to do this, this study looks at both Indian and Barbary captivity narratives.3 Scholars in the past have largely limited themselves to only one of these subsets of the captivity genre. This study maintains that by limiting one’s analysis only to Indian or Barbary captivity narratives is to miss half the story. Constructing a dialogue between both kinds of captivity narratives in a trans-Atlantic fashion also allows for a deeper understanding of the processes of othering at work in a wider variety of the genre’s manifestations. Furthermore, looking at Indian and Barbary captivity narratives, together, allows for a deeper appreciation of captivity narratives as tools of ethnogenesis. The scholarly approach, traditionally, has viewed ethnogenesis as a process of inclusion – whereby articulations of proper dress and comportment, virtuous values, appropriate religious beliefs, etc., delineate who belongs within a given community. Reading for ethnogenesis in captivity narratives requires a subversion of this mode of thinking. Individuals, taken in captivity, who wrote or dictated their own narratives, and writers, who wrote works in the captivity genre, largely built their understanding of Americanness through narratives of exclusion – by defining and denigrating what they found to be different in the captors’ “otherness.” A definite sense of what was American, by virtue of what was not American, coalesced around this scaffolding of difference. The importance of articulating a valorized, set- apart Americanness mattered, particularly given the tenuous position of the United States 3 Indian captivity narratives, as the name suggests, concern the capture of frontier settlers by Indian tribes. Barbary captivity narratives involve the capture, at sea, of Americans by privateers working out of the Barbary states of North Africa – Tunis,