Captivity Narratives

This book reexamines the Anglo-American literary genre known as the "Indian captivity narrative" in the context of the complex historical practice of captivity across cultural borders in colonial North America. This detailed & nuanced study of the relationship between practice & representation on the one hand & identity & alterity on the other is an important contribution to cultural studies, American studies, Native American studies, women's studies, & historical anthropology.

A study of orphan imagery as a reflection of cultural identity formation in America.

This volume of essays examines the forced dispossession of the Middle Passage through the texts, religious rites, economic exchanges, dance and music it elicited, both on the liminal transatlantic journey and on the continent and eventual return. As a whole this collection establishes a broad topographical and temporal context for the Passage that extends from the interior of Africa across the Atlantic and to the interior of the Americas, and from the time of the Middle Passage to the present day. A collective narrative of itinerant cultural consciousness as represented in histories, myth and arts, these contributions reconceptualize the meaning of the Middle Passage for African American history and fiction.

This book advances a new perspective in world history, arguing that institutions and culture--and not just the global economy--serve as important elements of international order. Focusing on colonial legal politics and the interrelation of local cultural contests and institutional change, it uses case studies to trace a shift in plural legal orders--from the multicentric law of early empires to the state-centered law of the colonial and postcolonial world. Benton shows how Indigenous subjects across time were active in making, changing, and interpreting the law--and, by extension, in shaping the international order.

These narratives recount the harrowing experiences of Englishmen abducted by the Barbary pirates of North Africa. After being sold into slavery, the narrators succeeded in returning to their homeland where their stories were printed. Never before available in a modern, annotated edition, these tales describe combat at sea, extraordinary escapes, and religious conversion, but they also illustrate the power, prosperity, and piety of Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. Each narrative is preceded by a brief introduction, and Nabil Matar's genera introduction provides important new information about the historical context of captivity and slavery in North Africa.