Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.17234/Croatica.69.11
BARBARY CAPTIVITY NARRATIVES AND THE EARLY AMERICAN NATIONAL IMAGINARY
Jelena Šesnić
orcid.org/0000-0002-4276-3490
; University of Zagreb, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
After winning independence from Britain, the newly constituted American nation found itself vulnerable to depredations of the Barbary corsairs in the Mediterranean, who used the backup provided by the Ottoman Empire or played European naval powers against one another. Thus the Barbary conflict, waged against the regencies of Algiers, Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco became the first post-revolutionary war of American history and caused a tremendous interest as reflected in a number of texts from the early national period spanning the 1790s to the 1820s. The prevalence of the works of Barbary captivity, or white slavery, is shown on the examples of various genres used to analyze the cultural, political, and military conflict besetting the early nation, deploying the textual representations proffered in novels, dramas and comedies, and autobiographical and fictional narratives of the Barbary captivity as sources of heteroimages to supplement the nationʼs autoimages, especially in the case of its own, African (black) slavery. Our discussion aims at foregrounding the underappreciated importance of the genres of Barbary captivity, as an international topic, in the processes of early national consolidation, the rise of the public print sphere and a national literary system. Our analyses point to the themes of intertextuality, generic fluidity, gender and class, the question of race and racialization, in the framework offered by the study of collective and national images in a comparative, transatlantic perspective.
Keywords
Barbary captivity; print culture; genre; early U.S. national period; autoimages; heteroimages
Hrčak ID:
341288
URI
Publication date:
16.12.2025.
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