An American ship has crossed the Atlantic and now nears the coast of Spain. To everyone’s dismay, unfamiliar sails appear on the horizon: the passengers know they are about to fall into the hands of pirates, be stripped, robbed, and sold into slavery. This is the beginning of a myriad of stories told between the 17th and the 19th century by captives kidnapped by pirates on the unruly waters around North Africa and enslaved by the lords of what the West called “Barbary” – the Muslim states of Lybia, Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria. Some will convert to Islam and settle into new, prosperous lives, others will be ransomed, escape, or find a way to return to their home countries, where they will publish their stories. This seminar, an exclusive collaboration between American Studies departments at the University of Duisburg Essen and the University of Innsbruck, will center on this fascinating and yet dramatically under-researched genre of American literature, the Barbary captivity narrative. We will read early American and 19th-century literary representations of American captives in North Africa against the backdrop of the US’ recent independence, its first engagement with Islam, its musings on the (im)morality of slavery, and the long “Barbary Wars” that will deplete its financial resources but mark its debut on the global arena. Like the “Orient,” the “Barbary” Coast is a real place as well as a screen on which the US and Europe projected fantasies of violence and seduction. Barbary captivity puts the young American democracy in front of an uncomfortable reverse mirror: expecting to see in these allegedly brutal, barbaric, and unjust Islamic cultures the opposite of its own values, it will be confronted with a rather accurate depiction of itself.
- Lehrende(r): Elena Furlanetto