J­ acob The Barbarous Voice of Democracy:

Rama American Captivity in Barbary and the

Berman Multicultural Specter

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

O n 25 July 1785, a Boston schooner named the
Maria, bound for the Mediterranean on a trading voyage, was com-
mandeered by a fourteen-gun Algerian xebec plying the waters off the
coast of Portugal. The “Mahometans” who boarded the six-man vessel
demanded to see its flag and papers. “[O]f the first they had no knowl-
edge,” writes James Cathcart in his account of eleven years in Barbary
captivity, “and the papers they could not read and Mediterranean pass
we had none.”1 With this terse assessment of national nonrecognition
and the international legal jeopardy it occasioned, the American na-
tion’s political relationship with the Islamic world opened its first vio-
lent chapter. The ongoing history of this relationship is proving to be a
complex narrative. Of late, scholars and historians have compared the
United States’ engagement in the Barbary Wars (1801–05; 1815) with
the nation’s current “war on terrorism,” which once again pits the
United States against stateless Muslim actors and the Islamic states
that give them harbor.2 Indeed, the two eras have striking parallels.
The just-marked two-hundredth anniversary of the United States’
first foreign military engagement, the Tripolitan War (1801–1805),
presents an appropriate time to survey the arc of American political,
military, and rhetorical relations with the Islamic world. Americans
first came to know this world through American narratives of Barbary
captivity and the wider public discussions to which this white slavery
gave impetus. According to Paul Baepler, although “the Barbary cap-
tivity narrative in English existed for more than three centuries, it
caught the attention of American readers primarily during the first
half of the nineteenth century. Between John Foss’ 1798 narrative and

American Literature, Volume 79, Number 1, March 2007

DOI 10.1215/00029831-2006-069  © 2007 by Duke University Press
  American Literature

the numerous printings of James Riley’s 1817 account. . . . Ameri-

can publishers issued over a hundred American Barbary captivity
editions.”3
Baepler demonstrates that tales of Anglo captivity in Barbary were
interpreted by both sides of the American slavery debate to support
their respective positions on the morality of slavery in the United

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

States.4 The figure of the captive has emerged again at the crux of
present contestations over the meaning of American democracy, play-
ing a role in claims used alternately to justify and castigate the U.S.
military mission against an Islamic enemy. Debates about the moral
justifications for captivity have become global, with Arabic television
networks and some European networks juxtaposing U.S. complaints
about war crimes committed against American soldiers with images
and discussions of the indefinite incarceration of Muslim prisoners at
the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. A return to discussions
surrounding Barbary slavery thus becomes pertinent to our under-
standing of the relationship between 1805 and the present moment in
American history. The discourse surrounding American captives in
Barbary illuminates the questions that the twin phenomena of Ameri-
can captivity of foreigners and foreign captivity of Americans demand
an ostensibly democratic society to confront.
The United States’ first contact with the Islamic empire and the
narratives of American captivity spun out of it together provide in-
sight into a critical juncture in the formation of American national
identity. The language of democracy that emerges from this zone of
contact is not the recognizable racial nationalism of white-citizenship
claims or the monocultural ethos of “ruthless democracy”; instead, it
resonates with the nascent vocabulary of multicultural democracy.5
Why did Barbary elicit from Anglo captives a language of democratic
identification with the disenfranchised back in the United States? Put
more narrowly, did these mercantile-minded sailors establish early ar-
guments for the universal application of democratic rights that simul-
taneously codify race and gender hierarchies within the nation form?
Did their position as foreign captives provide the possibility for iden-
tifying with otherness in a way that did not co-opt that otherness (and
subjugate it) in the service of Anglo nationalism? Finally, what is the
legacy of this Federal-era language of democratic inclusion today?
The American captives in Barbary in the Federal period were
mostly Northern, entrepreneurial men whose race or class position
 American Captivity in Barbary  

made the sea attractive. They were representative of a “Yankee” ethos

that would later come to define the entire country by the end of the
antebellum era, but as their narrative accounts suggest, they were also
attempting to individually reconcile their new status as slaves with
the greater claims (and failures) of the eighteenth-century American
revolutionary covenant promising democratic freedom and opportu-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

nity for all.6 In spite of their relative marginality, these sailors’ indi-
vidual travails were a source of collective interest within the United
States. The men captured off the coast of North Africa searching for
new markets became a new market themselves as narratives of their
captivity began to attract American readers. In fact, stories of Barbary
captivity in places such as Algiers, Tripoli, and Tunis were so popu-
lar that invented narratives, which were sold lucratively as authentic,
also entered the market. Federal-era American sociopolitical fears
about pluralism, despotism, race revolution, and the incoherence of a
heterogeneous society are all illuminated by the discourse surround-
ing American captivity in Barbary. Barbary acted as a screen onto
which these sailors projected fundamental questions about Ameri-
can citizenship, projections that were then returned to the American
reader in images of Anglo disenfranchisement and debasement at the
hands of native populations.
My essay aims to show that through representations of the poly-
glot, polyethnic, and polytheist Barbary culture, a socially marginal
yet economically emergent class of antebellum American sailors con-
templated the inequities in early national identity and opened up a
space in the American cultural imaginary, however slender and pro-
visional, that incorporated marginalized groups into the phantasm of
national citizenship.7 Indeed, the triangulated reconciliations among
self, other, and nation in these personal accounts of Anglo slavery in
North Africa established the imagery that writers of fictional captivity
tales soon deployed to exploit fears in the American populace about
pluralist inclusion.8 These narratives of captivity, real and fictional,
forced their audiences to confront both the dangers and the inevita-
bility of a multicultural nation.
Scholars in American studies have recently begun to examine
U.S. orientalism, tracing out the contours of a peculiarly American
engagement with both the material and the imaginary East.9 What
has yet to be sufficiently considered, however, is the formation of an
American antebellum discourse on Arabs, one that distinguished the
  American Literature

image of the Arab from the image of the Turk or Persian and from
the conglomerate image of the Islamic oriental—and then elaborated
the stakes inherent in these distinctions. In identifying this discourse
of American Arabism, my intention is to link its exotic imaginary of
the East, including the symbolic importance it gives to Arabs, to the
insular politics of U.S. national identity.10 My essay, then, reconstructs

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

a seminal moment in the discourse of American Arabism and demon-
strates how the image of the Arab became the exotic vehicle through
which Anglo-Americans navigated anxieties about the native inherent
in the formation of early American citizenship. Because there was no
population of Arabs in the antebellum United States, the image of the
Arab, with its mytho-historical connection to American identity, could
successfully articulate the democratic bond between white and black,
Anglo and indigene, and male and female at the safe historico-spatial
distance of an imaginary past. The construction of the Arab in Ameri-
can discourse thus speaks not so much to Arab identity as to Anglo-
American identity—and to how the meaning of Arabness influenced
its formation.
The period in U.S. history in which Barbary captivity narratives
reached their greatest popularity was preceded by a surge of interest
in Arabs and Arab history. In the 1790s, the American market was
inundated with books about Arabs and Muslims, including two biog-
raphies of Muhammad and the first American edition of the Arabian
Nights.11 Although the United States inherited a fascination with bibli-
cal narratives and Crusader mythology from its European ancestors,
Americans quickly developed their own repository of Arab imagery,
which spoke to the specificity of a nuclear American identity psychi-
cally aligned with wandering biblical patriarchs and Middle Eastern
space. Indeed, travelers, captives, and diplomats habitually described
Arab populations as unchanged for the last three thousand years;
thus, the figure of the Arab provided Americans with a living portrait
of their mythological ancestors.
This figure was introduced to American fiction readers by American
writers in the form of the oriental tale, a genre that enjoyed its great-
est vogue from 1780 to 1820. The American reading audience was al-
ready familiar with writers such as Thomas Moore, Lord Byron, and
Voltaire who had used oriental devices and characters as elements in
a visionary mode. The American version of the oriental tale, however,
was more didactic and less skeptical than its European predecessor.
 American Captivity in Barbary  

American writers often employed Arabs and Arab culture as heuristic

devices. Rationalists and deists, for example, tapped into the potential
for fantasy in the oriental milieu to explore alternatives to Calvinist
gloom and to materialize the God and heaven that Puritan doctrine
had insistently abstracted.12 In works such as Benjamin Franklin’s An
Arabian Tale (1779), the characters and contexts were predominantly

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

beneficent, philosophical, and devoid of ethnic or racial specificity.
The ethnographic precision of Barbary captivity tales, then, marked
a stage in the development of the image of the Arab in the American
consciousness when distinctions began to be drawn among different
oriental groups. The Ottoman colonial hierarchy that Barbary cap-
tives reproduced for American readers provided the kind of social and
ethnic stratification absent in early oriental tales, allowing Americans
to navigate the question of indigenousness and citizenship in the New
World.
To Federal-era Americans familiar with the literature of European
orientalism, such as the Arabian Nights, and who had a historical
sense of the Crusades and the Ottoman Empire, Arab and Muslim fig-
ures already represented the middle ground between savagery and
civilization. They occupied the literal and figurative space between
“dark” Africa and overrefined Europe, between ignorant pagan and
corrupted Christian. But this was precisely the middle ground that
the new American nation claimed to occupy. Richard Slotkin argues
that the American conception of national identity at the beginning
of the antebellum period was a struggle to find a medium between
European overcivilization and Native American savagery.13 Slotkin’s
analysis suggests that the American self-invention of national identity
was more a process of triangulation than binary differentiation. In Bar-
bary, American white slaves saw in the various cultural groups they
encountered not absolute difference from themselves but moments
of uncomfortable cultural recognition. Whether it was an association
with the power to enslave and subdue native populations represented
by the Turks or identification with indigenous tribes as an oppressed
population under the rule of a foreign power, Federal-era American
captives could identify with both Turkish and “native” populations in
Barbary.
The potential proximity of American and Barbary identity is ap-
parent in the white American captives’ anxious effort to discursively
marginalize Barbary culture to one extreme or the other and to claim
  American Literature

the vacated territory. Accordingly, representations of ethnic figures

in Barbary tend to emphasize either Arab degeneracy as a lack of
civilization (the dark and naked Bedouins) or Oriental decadence as
overcivilization (the sumptuous and cruel Turkish ruler). Two Ameri-
can captives in Tripoli provide examples in their narratives of these
opposing discursive strategies for containing Barbary identity and li-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

censing American identity. Dr. Jonathan Cowdery, captured aboard
the foundered brig Philadelphia on 31 October 1803, describes Tri-
poli’s “tribes of the back country” as follows:
Many of them have muskets without locks, but had a sort of match
to put fire to them. They were almost naked, half starved, and with-
out discipline. When they are going to battle, or appear before the
Bashaw, they run to and fro, shaking their rusty muskets above
their heads, all crying Halaout Buoy (I am my father’s son).14
Cowdery pushes these Arabized Berbers, or berberized Arabs, into
the literal and figurative “back country.” They are backward in rela-
tion to civilization, described, as were Natives of the American fron-
tier, as existing on the fringe of the modern world. Their weapons
are anachronistic, and their allegiance to their paternal past signals
a regressive rather than progressive worldview. These “tribes” are
clearly presented as relics of an antiquated era, which was still visible
on American shores in the form of Native Americans, although Ameri-
can tribes were in the process of being pushed into the nation’s own
“back country” past; in effect, they were being cleared away both lit-
erally and discursively. Cowdery’s description implies that a modern
Anglo army would easily demolish this Arab militia, a comforting sug-
gestion for Americans who might read their own imminent conflict
with Native nations of the American back country into the doctor’s
description of Barbary.
At the other end of the social scale, the sailor William Ray, who was
on the brig Philadelphia with the well-to-do doctor when it was cap-
tured, describes the Bashaw of Tripoli as having
. . . a very splendid and tawdry appearance. His vesture was a long
robe of cerulean silk, embroidered with gold and glittering with tin-
sel. His broad belt was ornamented with diamonds, and held two
gold-mounted pistols, and a sabre with a golden hilt, chain and scab-
bard. . . . [H]e is about five feet ten inches in height, rather corpu-
lent, and of manly, majestic deportment.15
 American Captivity in Barbary  

Ray registers the decadence of the Bashaw by marking the “splen-

did and tawdry” combination of material wealth and moral turpitude.16
The Bashaw’s “glittering” display of tinsel, gold, and diamonds con-
trasts with Ray’s own rags and supper of “black bread.” To Ray, a com-
mon “tar,” the aristocracy’s overabundance of wealth places the “cor-
pulent” Turkish usurper Bashaw in a class with King George. Thus,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

the other limit to Barbary identity is established, for the Bashaw’s
inhumanity, which will manifest itself later in Ray’s narrative, stems
not from his simple savagery but from his overcultivation. Again and
again, however, regardless of class dynamics, American captives in
Barbary turn to descriptions of the native’s natural savagery and
the ruler’s cultivated cruelty (which often took the form of unique
kinds of torture) as markers of the extreme nature of Barbary culture.
Ultimately, both Ray’s and Cowdery’s descriptions marginalize the
Barbary inhabitant, representing the population of Tripoli as either
Indian or English (or European) in their degeneracy and decadence,
thus clearing the space between savagery and overcivilization for
American identity to flourish.17
Ray’s critique of Barbary, however, can also be read as a critique of
the United States. In his journal, Ray’s contact with Barbary culture
makes manifest the inherently undemocratic nature of many facets of
an ostensibly democratic American society. Ray found it disturbing,
for example, that common sailors and officers were treated differently
not only by the country that captured them but also by the United
States. The U.S. government paid a monthly allowance to the North
African regencies for the American captives’ benefit; however, cap-
tains received eight dollars a month and sailors only three dollars and
fifty cents. The Barbary context acts as a litmus test for American
values, revealing the inconsistencies between the American rheto-
ric of democratic equality and the government’s practice of support-
ing class privilege. In his critique of this hierarchy, Ray notes that
“[p]etty despotism is not confined alone to Barbary’s execrated and
piratical shores; but the base and oppressive treatment can be experi-
enced from officers of the American, as well as the British and other
navies.”18 Ray collapses the differences between Barbary and Ameri-
can culture—and between American and British culture—to make a
point about the gap between American ideals and practice. By using
images of Barbary to critique the United States, however, he demon-
strates the interpenetration of the two cultures.
  American Literature

Ray’s conflation of Barbary and American identity is a rhetorical

strategy of social critique, but many captives collapsed the socioeth-
nic hierarchy in order to create a coherent image of Barbary culture,
for which most Americans had no actual referent. Michel Foucault
contends that the study of humans and the tabulation of their relation-
ships to the world was a phenomenon that appeared around the be-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

ginning of the nineteenth century, a period coinciding with American
captivity in Barbary and the formative moment of American national
identity politics.19 This process of identifying the human and tabulat-
ing all its variations and connections is apparent in American captives’
protoethnographic accounts of Barbary culture. John Foss, captured
by the Regency of Algiers some years earlier than Cowdery and Ray,
demonstrates a process of conflation, distinction, and connection in
creating a taxonomy of the inhabitants of Algiers:
The Turks are a well-built robust people, their complexion not
unlike Americans, tho’ somewhat larger, but their dress, and long
beards, make them more like monsters than human beings.
The Cologlies are somewhat less in stature than the Turks, and
are of a more tawny complexion.
The Moors are generally a tall thin, spare set of people, not much
inclining to fat, and of a very dark complexion, much like the Indi-
ans of North America.
The Arabs, or Arabians, are of a much darker complexion than the
Moors, being darker than Mulattoes. They are much less in stature
than the Moors, being the smallest people I ever saw. . . . As they
are not allowed to trade in any mercantile line, nor even learn any
mechanic art, they are obliged to be drudges to their superiors.20
Foss strings together four distinct inhabitants of the Algerian re-
gion as contiguous links in a cultural chain of being, with each one’s
identity determined in relation to the previous one. “[I]n the act of
speaking,” writes Foucault, “or rather in the act of naming, human na-
ture—like the folding of representation back upon itself—transforms
the linear nature of thoughts into a constant table of partially differ-
ent beings.”21 Foss’s act of “naming” these “partially different beings”
offers not simply a continuum of color, describing progressively darker
peoples as he descends the social scale, but also a hierarchy of civili-
zation based on physical appearance. Foss’s table is not only linear; it
also takes on depth and, as a “constant table,” eventually extends to
 American Captivity in Barbary  

include the kinds of people found in the United States as well as Bar-
bary. Foss begins with the Turks, the group he finds most like Ameri-
cans, in skin color and in their “robust” stature. He moves through
the dark Moors who most closely resemble American “Indians” and
comes finally to the darkest of the group and also the shortest in stat-
ure—the Arabs. Foss effectively imposes the American racial hier-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

archy onto the inhabitants of Algiers, placing white Americans on top,
Native Americans in the middle, and substituting the “darker” Arabs
for the black African population forced to the bottom. Turk and Arab
are represented as two ends of one spectrum, distinct yet intrinsically
connected. The American captive aligns the population of Algiers in a
racially charged ladder of power and, in his act of naming, congeals his
interpretation of their identity into a locus of self-apparent knowledge.
Thus, Foss naturalizes a familiar American racial table by demonstrat-
ing its universal applicability. But because Foss’s Barbary hierarchy
is modeled on the social hierarchy in the United States, the explicit
connection between Turk and Arab implicitly suggests that Anglo-
Americans, Native Americans, and African slaves in the United States
are also connected in a chain of being.22
But even the narrative possibility of this connection between Anglos
and their others elicits from Foss an anxious demarcation of the
Anglo-ness of American identity. The Turks, he states, are “not unlike
Americans”; then ten words later, he insists that they are “more like
monsters than human beings” because of their dress and beards. The
“monstrous” difference between Turk and American has to be quickly
established because of their similarity. The implications of retaining
an undisturbed similarity are multiple, but it was most important to
avoid signaling the Anglo-American’s racial or ethnic connection to
Natives and black slaves. This possibility threatened to open up con-
tingent discourses on topics as varied as institutionalized plantation
rape, polygenesis vs. monogenesis, and the incompleteness of the
American Revolution. It would also have meant recognizing Anglo-
American despotism and hegemony mirrored in Barbary despotism.
Just as Cowdery and Ray marginalize the tribal Arabs and the Bashaw,
respectively, as perverse extremes of civilization in an effort to dis-
tance themselves from their other and to clear a middle space for their
own identities, Foss perverts his Turk into a “monster” in an anxious
reaction to self-recognition. Perhaps even more illustrative of Ameri-
can racial anxiety than the “monstrous” Turk is the “Cologlie.” The
10  American Literature

child of a Turkish soldier and an Algerian woman, this hybrid figure

has no American double because it represents the possibility of racial
hybridity, which had no place in Foss’s American racial imaginary.
Foss’s description of the Barbary social ladder demonstrates that
the American construction of North African identity is dramatically
shaped by national rhetorical needs. Foss thus justifies the social

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

stratification of Barbary through descriptions of physical stature, writ-
ing the body into a transparent testament of racial hierarchy in a dis-
cursive move that reveals more about antebellum American anxiety
than it does about Barbary society. Foss rewrites the black slave body
as dark Arab body and, in turn, marks that body as belonging to “the
smallest people I ever saw.” Americans in the 1790s needed to look no
farther than just off their own coast to the island of Saint Domingue
to see the possibility of slave revolution, a fear that white refugees
from the island brought to American cities through the port of New
Orleans. Thomas Jefferson puts these fears into perspective in a state-
ment on slavery and justice contemporary with Foss’s captivity: “In-
deed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that this
justice can not sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and
natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange
of situation, is among possible events.”23
The threat of revolution wasn’t solely racial. In the 1790s, Spain en-
couraged American settlers in Kentucky, Tennessee, and the south-
west territory to believe that the Spanish crown offered more protec-
tion than a distant U.S. government located on the eastern seaboard.
Given these Federal-era pressures on the stability of the American gov-
ernment, it is informative to compare Foss’s description of the Arab
population of Algiers with the description of Barbary Arabs in Samuel
Goodrich’s series, the Peter Parley Universal Histories: “They are tall,
handsome, and grave in their deportment, with piercing black eyes,
teeth white and glittering, a dark complexion, and black hair.”24 The
gap between Foss’s diminutive Arabs and Goodrich’s tall and hand-
some Arabs reveals the quotient of imagination fed into both of their
descriptions. Was Foss describing a segment of the population that
wasn’t Arab but that he labels as Arab because of its social status? Or
was Goodrich, some thirty years later, collapsing romantic portrayals
of Arabians in ancient Arabia into his description of the contemporary
Arabs in Barbary?
The point is not to distill some accurate portrayal of ethnic Arabs in
 American Captivity in Barbary  11

Barbary but to illuminate the discursive strategy of creating an Arab

identity that supports a particularly American discourse on identity.
Barbara Harlow’s theorization of the sociopolitical desire embedded
in French colonial postcards from Algeria explains how snapshot ac-
counts of the manner and customs of North African life speak to the
domestic identity politics of Western audiences. Harlow asserts that

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

these postcards “wrest certain features of Algerian life from their
indigenous context only to reinscribe them within a framework that
answers to the political and psychological needs of the imperialist’s
appropriation of the Orient.”25 Although Harlow is talking about the
era 1900 to 1930, and about French colonialism specifically, the les-
son applies to Foss’s account of Algerian life. Indeed, the difference
between the historical circumstances of the early-twentieth-century
French occupation of Algeria and late-eighteenth-century American
captivity in Algeria is as informative as the similarities between these
temporally disconnected Western encounters with North African
space. Instead of a colonial gaze directed outward from the colonizing
country toward the colony, as with the French postcards, Foss’s gaze
is directed inward. His descriptions of Algerian manners and customs
bear the anxiety of an ethnic group, Anglos, whose claim of possess-
ing American space is tenuous, not the least because these claims
are underpinned by a false democratic rhetoric. Thus, the question
of colonial or imperial appropriation in the context of Federal-era na-
tional identity politics boomerangs back from Africa to the American
homeland, demonstrating that fantasies about the meaning of the term
Arab and about the meaning of American democracy are connected.
Thus, Foss’s description of the Arab population in Barbary betrays a
moment rife with a desire to suppress even the narrative possibility of
slave revolution in the United States. Because Arabs occupy the same
social position in Barbary as black slaves in his own country, Foss
attempts to rhetorically diminish Arab potency by marking Arabs as
small and subservient.
The irony is that whereas Foss uses the scopic marker of black skin
to familiarize American readers with the social position of Arabs in
Barbary, the linguistic term Arab, when transported to the United
States, supports race hierarchy by symbolically erasing the blackness
of certain slaves’ skin. Allan Austin has chronicled the lives of seventy-
five African slaves on American plantations who identified themselves
as Muslims. Many were literate because of Koranic training. This lit-
12  American Literature

eracy, as Austin relates, “gave them some standing in the New World,
particularly among those who decided that the literate slaves must
be Moors or Arabs because they would not credit such a possibility
as literacy in an African.”26 In this plantation context, the construc-
tion of the term Arab ostensibly supports racism by allowing white
Southerners to maintain categorical prejudice against black Africans

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

through practices such as marking “outstanding” Africans as Arabs,
instead of recognizing their visible African heritage. Although these
West African slaves were indeed Muslim, they were not Arab or Moor.
In the stratification of plantation society, the range of power positions
from field slave to house slave to supervisor of other slaves mirrored
arguments for the natural hierarchy of man, with the “whitest” slaves
holding the highest position, even if they were whitened through an
imaginative process. These literate slaves, however, both justified
race hierarchy and undermined it through their proximity to white
identity.27 The articulation of the term Arab in American discourse
thus creates the possibility of connection between the Anglo and the
other of Anglo-American sociopolitical discourse, even if it operates
in the immediate service of maintaining racial stratification.
The willful misinterpretation of Arab identity as a prominent fea-
ture of antebellum American images of the Arab returns us to a con-
sideration of the peculiar reliance in American national discourses on
defining the meaning of Arabness. When the term Arab was applied to
African slaves living in the antebellum United States, it operated as a
discursive bulwark separating African and white culture, but it also
opened up a catachrestic space. As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has
put it, “[W]ords or concepts [in this space] are wrested from their
proper meaning.” The interpretive slip that marks black Muslims on
the plantation as Arabs creates “a concept metaphor without an ade-
quate referent.” Thus, the term Arab accrues an excessive value that
cannot be fully absorbed by its referent.28 This excessive value disturbs
the binary of Christian humanism and Muslim despotism that domi-
nates current academic discussions of the antebellum experience of
the Muslim world and illuminates a residual pre-Islamic element that
still palpitates in the American image of the Arab. This pre-Islamic
element reveals a seminal American identification with Arab identity
that infuses antebellum American representations of the Arab with
a calculated ambivalence, not because Americans ignore the Islamic
creed of nineteenth-century Arabs but because the image of the Arab
 American Captivity in Barbary  13

also accesses discourses on biblical patriarchs, fierce individualism,

and civilization in the wilderness. Hence, in the 1850s, the figure of
the street Arab appears in urban fiction and children’s fiction as a way
to describe white children who have been symbolically racialized by
their indigence. For instance, in Horatio Alger’s Tattered Tom series,
Tom is the central figure in a capitalist allegory that follows the street

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

Arab’s path from nomadic shoe-shine into the capitalist economic re-
lations that by the tale’s conclusion rewhiten, domesticate, and stabi-
lize the gender of the hero (by revealing that he is really a girl). In this
formulation, the street Arab acts as a protean version of the Ameri-
can entrepreneur and the ethnic Arab as the symbolic ancestor to the
American citizen.29
Characterizing the image of the Arab as a catachresis not only con‑
firms the fact that American representations of Arabs are what John
Michael has called “figments of the Western imagination” but also
clarifies that these figments create the imaginary scene necessary
for Anglo-Americans to confront their anxieties about the exclusivity
of particularistic formations of American citizenship.30 In this Arab
image-space, where identity is negotiable and the signifier is free-
floating, self and other meet in an uncanny embrace. It is a place
where, as Slavoj Žižeck says, “we identify ourselves with the other
precisely at a point at which he is inimitable, at the point which eludes
resemblance.”31 As a concept metaphor without a stable referent, the
image of the Arab operates as a conduit for the Anglo-American to
identify with the disenfranchised Native and the enslaved African pre-
cisely at the point of nonresemblance. Therefore, in the fictional narra-
tives of Barbary captivity that emerged on the American market, the
Anglo self does not resemble or imitate the “dark-skinned” other but,
rather, occupies the subjective position of the other while retaining
an essential Anglo identity. In this formulation, a new position of sub-
jective enunciation opens up and the other of American national dis-
course is granted a voice of response and authority, albeit still filtered
through Anglo consciousness. The collective cultural desire to hear
this other voice can be located in the place where my essay began—
the ­market.
Nowhere is the influence of the reading market on early American
representations of Barbary more apparent than in the fictional cap-
tivity narratives that were sold as authentic. The imagined Arabs in
these invented tales operate as proxies, and the fictive encounter
14  American Literature

between the American and the Arab allows Americans to negotiate

democratic rhetorical hypocrisies by reimagining themselves in per-
verse juxtapositions. Thus, Eliza Bradley describes her imagined cap-
ture by North African “natives” as an inverted homecoming in which
the United States is replaced with Barbary:
About two hours after the party had departed in search of water,

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

they returned nearly out of breath, and apparently much affrighted,
and informed us that they had been pursued by a party of natives
(some of whom were mounted on camels) and that they were but a
short distance from us! . . . Their appearance, indeed, was frightful,
being nearly naked, and armed with muskets, spears and scimeters
[my emphasis].
Our company having no weapons with which to defend them-
selves, they approached and prostrated themselves at the feet of
the Arabs (for such they proved to be) as a token of submission. This
they did not, however, seem to understand, but seizing us with all
the ferocity of cannibals, they in an instant stripped us almost naked
[my emphasis].32
While Bradley invokes the white-settler identity of the American
past in her fictive encounter with the natives on shore, she also regis-
ters the ambivalent nature of the boundary between settler and native.
The imaginative inversion and perversion of these two roles in Bar-
bary dramatizes for Americans not only anxieties about revolution
(racial or otherwise) and the morbid desire to fantasize about the out-
come but also a collective cultural need for negotiating the inequities
in American democracy. Whereas Anglo-Americans saw themselves
uncomfortably mirrored in the figure of the Turk, in the figure of the
Arab they saw the other part of the American population staring back
at them. The Turk, as both illegitimate usurper and legitimized hege-
mon, offered Americans a split image of themselves—an image that
highlighted the conflict between Anglo-Americans’ imaginative cul-
tural opposition to the English and their cultural affiliation with En-
glish ancestry. Americans could see themselves in the Turk and they
could see the English in the Turk; hence, the figure of the Turk facili-
tated discourses on the evils of patriarchy, tyranny, and usurpation
that threatened to become unconscious critiques of the United States’
own involvement in these practices.
But the image of the Arab, linked in a cultural continuum to the
 American Captivity in Barbary  15

image of the Turk, also offered Anglo-Americans a moment of anx-

ious recognition. The Arabs in Bradley’s fictitious description are first
called “natives” and then referred to as “Arabs” before finally being
labeled “cannibals.” Besides demonstrating Bradley’s investment
in marking Arabs as natives, although they are not natives of North
Africa, this cycle of names allows Arabs to both fit within and to vacil-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

late between the ethnic tropes of Native American and African Ameri-
can. Although neither of these latter groups was recognized politi-
cally as American by Anglo-Americans, both nevertheless occupied
the literal and imaginative geography of American space. They were
a presence that Anglo-Americans had to acknowledge subconsciously
and whose claims for inclusion in the national identity were litigated
through imaginative projection. When Anglo-American readers came
across this passage, they could imagine themselves staring at the
native presence in their own country as well as the native presence in
Africa that had gained a claim to American identity. A few lines later,
Bradley describes the “warm contest” that erupts between the Arabs
who are claiming the white Americans as “property” in what had to be
recognized as a conscious inversion of African slavery in the United
States.33 The self becomes other, and recognizes itself in the other, for
by the end of the passage, the difference between white captives and
Arabs has been elided when the “nearly naked” natives strip the cap-
tives until they are “almost naked.” All that is left of Anglo difference
is the fig leaf of civilization—a metonym that links Anglo and native.
Thus, master becomes slave as racial hierarchies are collapsed, in-
verted, and perverted. In the Barbary milieu, the Anglo occupies the
place of the subaltern in a moment of identification with American
otherness and a gesture toward both inclusion and the anxiety that
the possibility of inclusive national identity breeds.
James Cathcart’s adoption of a hybridized, Barbary-American iden-
tity provides yet another perspective on the issues of cultural identity
that Barbary captives and Americans in general struggled with in the
Federal era.34 Cathcart, who rose from teenaged captive in Barbary
to influential diplomatic player in the Tripolitan War, learned Arabic,
studied Arab as well as Barbary history, and requested a diplomatic
appointment in North Africa after his redemption from captivity. While
a captive, Cathcart not only managed to save enough money (from the
proceeds of three slave-prison taverns he owned) to buy the ship that
sailed him home but he also raised himself from a common slave to
16  American Literature

the highest position a Christian could hold in Algiers: secretary to

the dey. Baepler explains the irascible sailor’s unique social mobility
in Barbary: “[W]hether by luck, industry, bribery, or willingness to
inform on his fellow sufferers, Cathcart knew how to take advantage
of his situation.”35
Cathcart’s observations and reflections, unlike other captives’ pub-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

lished diaries, were not market driven. His closet journal was not
intended for an audience at home and was only published long after
his death as The Captives, Eleven Years a Prisoner in Algiers (1899).
Through this private writing, Cathcart crafted the lines of identity
that would allow him to project a distinct identity in a foreign space;
thus, he individually performed the collective identity politics of the
nation. However, Cathcart’s passage from debased self to exalted na-
tion occasions moments of anxious intersubjectivity, especially when
he was forced to reconcile his country’s idealized language of democ-
racy with its real citizenship laws.
Eight years to the day after his capture, Cathcart chides the United
States for neglecting its obligation to one of its citizens:
Is it possible . . . an exile forever from my dear, but cruel Pa‑
tria . . . ? . . . O! America, could you see the miserable situation of
your citizens in captivity, who have shed their blood to secure you
the liberty you now posses and enjoy; . . . you are the first that set
the example to the world, to shake off the yoke of tyranny, to expel
despotism and injustice from the face of the earth. The negroes
have even had a share in your deliberations, and have reaped the
benefits arising from your wise and wholesome laws and regula-
tions. . . . Have we sold our birthright? Are we excluded without
cause from the privileges enjoyed indiscriminately by our lowest
class of citizens? (­C, 141)
The captive’s voice, split between devotion and reprimand, calls to
the homeland from across the Atlantic. The Middle Passage is here
reversed and inverted into the penumbra of a white slave’s journal of
African captivity. It is in the very will to reterritorialize, or repatriate,
that the captive exile moves across the boundaries of individual iden-
tity to identify with the nation itself. But what nation does the exile
imagine awaits him, and how does that imaginary nation speak to the
anxieties latent in the collective consciousness of the real nation Cath-
cart has not seen in eight years? In this respect, Cathcart’s refrain “O!
 American Captivity in Barbary  17

America,” which he repeats throughout this journal entry, constitutes

a territorial assemblage, an attempt to locate home amid his chaotic
surroundings. For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, “the role of the
refrain [in discourse] . . . is territorial, a territorial assemblage. . . . The
refrain may assume other functions, amorous, professional or social,
liturgical or cosmic: it always carries earth with it: it has a land (some-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

times a spiritual land) as its concomitant; it has an essential relation to
a Natal, a Native.”36
In calling out “O! America” in his journal, Cathcart summons the
“spiritual land” that is “concomitant” to his refrain. The exile expresses
his desire to return to the nurturing mother of his natal condition, but
this mother has been transmuted from a physical home to a phantasm.
This imaginary status of the homeland obviates the realities of Anglo
colonialism in the New World and allows Cathcart to assume the posi-
tion of “a Native.” The word itself—“America”—constructs this native
home through repetition by defining an “earthy” locus in the chaos
of infinite space that Cathcart can then begin to order with meaning.
In his journal, “America” becomes a “territorial assemblage.” Indeed,
national identity is this very act of assembling the “spiritual land,” a
node that locates one’s distinctiveness and marks space’s infinity with
imaginary boundaries—a child drawing a circle, a man marking a map.
This invocation of national identity is occasioned by Cathcart’s deter-
ritorialization, by his removal and inability to return to his home.
The refrain is also a type of communication as passage, a move-
ment from one territorial assemblage to another—from the physical
slave prison to the spiritual homeland, from Barbary to the United
States, from foreigner to native, from individual to nation. “[T]here
is rhythm,” Deleuze and Guattari explain, “whenever there is a trans-
coded passage from one milieu to another, a communication of milieus,
a coordination between heterogeneous time-spaces” (TP, 313). The
refrain builds rhythm, and rhythm creates a passage through chaos
from one milieu to another, coordinating in the process the heteroge-
neous spaces of Barbary and the United States. Deleuze and Guattari,
however, also insist that “whenever there is transcoding, we can be
sure that there is not simple addition, but the constitution of a new
plane, as of surplus value” (TP, 314). The emancipated slaves are
Cathcart’s surplus value; the nation, whole and without the contra-
diction of chattel slavery, is the new plane. As exile, Cathcart bases
his melodramatic claims for repatriation on the right of individual citi-
18  American Literature

zens to ask of their country what the Revolutionary War earned and
ensured for all U. S. citizens: freedom, justice, equality. Yet in order for
Cathcart’s claim to be valid, he must rhetorically position the nation’s
slaves as free American citizens. The Barbary milieu not only allows
Cathcart to imagine himself as “a Native” of a constructed American
landscape; it also forces him to reimagine a United States in which the

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

social-justice claims of African slaves are recognized, even if slaves
are marked as the “lowest class of citizens.” African slaves, though
hierarchically inscribed, are granted citizenship in Cathcart’s phan-
tasm and thus an imaginative foothold in the political future of the
American nation.
The parallel between the African captivity of white Americans and
the American captivity of black Africans that Cathcart’s invocation
implies was made explicit forty years later in William Lloyd Garri-
son’s preface to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass:
An American sailor, who was cast away on the shore of Africa,
where he was kept in slavery for three years, was at the expiration
of that period found to be imbruted and stultified—he had lost all
reasoning power; and having forgotten his native language, could
only utter some savage gibberish between Arabic and English.37
Comparing the black slave’s position not with the Indian captivity
of Puritan settlers but with the African captivity of white American
citizens, Garrison places Douglass’s narrative within the historical
continuum of American captivity. He not only humanizes the African
American subject, albeit in a troubling manner by comparing him to
the temporarily inarticulate Anglo subject, but he also makes an im-
plicit claim for recognizing African Americans as American citizens.
Garrison’s comparison of the two conditions of slavery prompts a
closer look at both types of captivity. This scrutiny reveals that the
difference between the white captive in Barbary and the African slave
in the United States ultimately cannot be elided, because resonating
within the “savage gibberish between Arabic and English,” which
Garrison marks as the language of white exile from civilization, is a
barbarous voice of democratic justice.
Upon receiving the knowledge that he will be heading to Baltimore,
an eight-year-old Douglass is instructed to bathe himself in the river
in order to remove the plantation scurf from his body. When he re-
counts this moment of ritual bathing as transition, he offers a medi-
 American Captivity in Barbary  19

tation on more than the ineradicable difference that excluded African

Americans from civil membership in portions of the United States. He
also ponders what separated the plight of white Americans in Barbary
from that of black Africans in the American South:
The thought of owning a new pair of trousers was great indeed!
It was almost sufficient motive, not only to make me take off what

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

would be called by pig-drovers the mange, but the skin itself. I went
at it in good earnest, working for the first time with the hope of
reward.38
When Douglass’s mistress tells him that if he washes himself clean
he will be given a pair of trousers, he responds with a poignant image
that blends the naïveté of his narrative position with the disillusion-
ment of the narrator. The young Douglass imagines that the literal
geographic transition from plantation to city will occasion a transi-
tion in social standing; he will move from the figurative position of an
animal, defined by his pig-skin of mange, to a humanized subject who
wears trousers. Thus he works, as all members of a capitalist society
do, with the “hope of reward.” Yet Douglass cannot erase his racial
identity as easily as he can shed the mangy markings of his former
social standing. Rather he could only “hope” to “take off . . . the skin
itself” in antebellum Maryland and universalize the benefits of labor
in a capitalist economy.
American slaves in Barbary, on the other hand, could enter nor-
malized social relations and shed their marginal status as slaves if
they agreed to convert to Islam. Royall Tyler, author of the fictional
captivity narrative The Algerine Captive (1797), crafts a bathing scene
that works dialectically with Douglass’s scene. Tyler’s hero, Updike
Underhill, has been invited to leave the fields of slave labor and join
the Muslim mullah at the Muslim College for a series of discussions
comparing Islam and Christianity:
Immediately upon my entering these sacred walls, I was carried
to a warm bath, into which I was immediately plunged; while my
attendants, as if emulous to cleanse me from all the filth of errour
rubbed me so hard with their hands and flesh brushes, that I verily
thought they would have flayed me. . . . I was then anointed on all
my parts, which had been exposed to the sun with a preparation of
a gum, called the balm of Mecca. This application excited a very
uneasy sensation, similar to the stroke of the water pepper to which
20  American Literature

“the liberal shepherds give a grosser name.” In twenty-four hours,

the sun-browned cuticle peeled off, and left my face, hands, legs and
neck as fair as a child’s of six months old.39
In this bathing scene, the threat of conversion is allegorized into
a sexual threat that will challenge Updike’s gender orientation even
as it excites a “very uneasy sensation.” Thus, as Updike prepares for

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

entrance into the college and his pending religious seduction by the
mullah, his body is feminized and infantilized by the act of bathing.
But unlike Douglass’s body, Updike’s body is successfully stripped
of its skin. The application of the “balm of Mecca” to his body simul-
taneously puts his gender identity in question and allows him to re-
gain his essential whiteness by peeling off the darker cuticle of slave
skin. The soft, feminine, white skin that Updike rediscovers speaks
to America’s late-eighteenth-century contradictory discourses on
race and labor ethics: the white body is superior in racial discourse,
but the browned and hardened laboring body is superior in the con-
text of Protestant values. Despite these contradictions, the balm from
Mecca literally Arabizes Updike’s body. Updike uses his Arab skin of
passage as a way to move not only from slavery to freedom but also
from blackness to whiteness. Ultimately, like Bradley’s mariners and
Cathcart’s repatriated exile, Updike does not resemble or imitate the
“dark skinned” other of American slavery but occupies the subjective
position of the slave while retaining an essential Anglo identity.
The figurative Arabization of Updike’s body has a parallel in the
antebellum U.S. slave owner’s practice of figuratively Arabizing the
African bodies of exceptional slaves on the plantation, but it also
resonates with Cathcart’s actual experience of Arabizing himself as
a strategy of both physical and cultural survival. Near the end of The
Captives, Cathcart narrates what he calls the most dangerous moment
of his captivity: a confrontation in his own slave tavern with a Muslim
sheriff who demands his seat because he is an infidel. Cathcart re-
sponds to this charge with his Arabized tongue:
As far as being without faith I believe in the faith of my forefathers
(la illah, ila Allah), there is no God but the true God. But as I was
not born in the same country that you was, I have not been taught
the symbol of your faith, but I know it. You say “la illah, ila Allah
wa Mahomed Arasule Allah, there is no God but the true God and
Mohammed is his prophet.” I do not know Mohammed as a prophet,
 American Captivity in Barbary  21

but I believe him to have been a very great law giver, who converted
millions of idolators and induced them to worship the only true God,
as I do. (C, 143)
In an adroit rhetorical move, Cathcart recites the shehadda, the pro-
fession of the Islamic creed, to establish his faith in Islam if not his
Islamic faith. Cathcart believes in the “only true God,” as Muslims

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

do, but he reserves the right to give that God a name that hinges on
the contingency of cultural context. By narrating his faith in both the
Arabic Allah and the English God of Christianity, Cathcart hybridizes
two languages of identity in his own catachrestic gesture of survival.
Yet it is not the threat of death from the Muslim sheriff that Cathcart
marks as most dangerous; rather, it is the possibility of conversion
that his act of hybridization occasions. Cathcart, through an act of hy-
brid identification, might lose his subject status as American citizen
and become permanently Algerian. When Cathcart’s conversion inci-
dent is related to the dey and the question of his faith is settled, the
erstwhile sailor from Boston is allowed to keep his Christian creed
and thus ultimately his American citizenship upon his redemption
three years later. Cathcart’s knowledge of Arabic allows him to simul-
taneously establish his rightful place within Barbary society and pre-
vent the loss of his American cultural identity, but it also establishes
his “savage gibberish between Arabic and English” as the exile’s
claim to justice. Cathcart, alternating between cultural identities and
languages, carves out a multicultural space of enunciation, one that is
directly linked to the United States’ democratic covenant and nuclear
identification with exile.
I read the “savage gibberish between Arabic and English,” which
Garrison marks as the brutish language of the white captive in Africa,
as the hybrid language of a self reconciling itself to its other. This
psychic confrontation is brought about by the experience of exile and
captivity. Upon his arrival in Algiers, Cathcart and his fellow Ameri-
cans are brought to the homes of several prominent Algerians who
are “curious to see Americans, having supposed [them] to be the ab-
origines of the country” (C, 110). Again, Cathcart figuratively places
himself in the position of the disenfranchised, this time the aborigi-
nal. The Algerian viewers’ mistaken assumption that Americans are
aboriginal inhabitants of the United States points not only to the mo-
mentary collapse of the difference in social status between Anglo and
Native Indian that transference to Barbary space entails, but it also
22  American Literature

highlights the role of Anglo as usurper. The Anglo has taken the place
of the aboriginal inhabitant of America and literally stands in for his
country’s native population. What is at stake here, then, is not only
the split in subjectivity when Cathcart embodies both himself and the
nation but a splintering of subjectivity when the exile sees himself as
embodying the plight of many different exiles.

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

In Cathcart’s image of himself being surveyed by curious Algeri-
ans, the captive conjures his nation’s fraught (post)colonial identity
by imagining himself simultaneously as disenfranchiser and dis-
enfranchised: as Anglo colonizer and aboriginal colonized. Exile in
Barbary forces Cathcart, and other captives like him, to see them-
selves in the other. This experience appears in most contact litera-
ture; however, the peculiarity of Barbary captivity spoke directly to
the United States’ nascent struggle for national identity, particularly
around the questions of indigenousness, citizenship, and disenfran-
chisement. Again, Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the territorial as-
semblage speaks to the way in which national identity, as conceived
from the position of exile, involves continual and violent reimaginings
and reterritorializations: “Finally one opens the circle a crack, opens
it all the way, lets someone in, calls someone” (TP, 311). The circle,
the imaginative boundary of self and nation, opens up and beckons
to those it has disenfranchised with its arbitrary demarcations: “One
opens the circle not on the side where the old forces of chaos press
against it but in another region, one created by the circle itself” (TP,
311). In Cathcart’s claim for repatriation, the circle, the lines of terri-
torial acquisition that the United States had drawn and was continuing
to redraw on its borders, opens up in the direction of the disenfran-
chised Native and the displaced African slave. Although Cathcart’s
journal was not published in the Federal era, the experiences he re-
lates are emblematic of that time. The images of racial, religious, and
social inversion engendered by American captivity in Barbary pried
open a discursive space for fictional writers of captivity, and later, for
American romantics who used oriental imagery to explore American
subjectivity from the margins. The pluralistic potential of American
identity that emerges, albeit anxiously, at salient moments in these
Barbary captivity narratives expresses the claims for inclusion of the
disenfranchised groups who were physically present in, but psychi-
cally excluded from, the new American nation.
What the discourse of Barbary captivity demonstrates to twenty-
 American Captivity in Barbary  23

first-century scholars, then, is not the consistency of American im-

perial ideology over the last two hundred years but, rather, the United
States’ ability to reformulate its language of identification, in each
global moment, to address the democratic anxieties that proliferated
in the lacuna between rhetoric and reality in the Federal era. The
Arab, as a phantasmatic construction that acts as an object lesson on

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

American identity, thus plays a crucial role today in establishing the
rhetorical necessity for current American democratic interventions
abroad. As for the present gap between rhetoric and action in Ameri-
can foreign policy, this is precisely the reservoir where future imperial
justifications are collecting.
Louisiana State University

Notes

1 James Cathcart, The Captives, Eleven Years a Prisoner in Algiers (1899),

in White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Cap-
tivity Narratives, ed. Paul Michel Baepler (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1999), 107. Further references to Cathcart’s narrative are to this
edition and will be cited parenthetically as C.
2 Although Barbary pirates were nominally citizens of the North African
regency out of which they operated, many were soldiers of fortune. Some
of them, including the captain of Tripoli’s maritime force, Murad Rais
(Peter Lisle), were termed renegadoes, former Europeans who had con-
verted to Islam in order to operate their raiding missions freely from
North African ports. Two recent histories establish a continuum between
the current U.S. war on terror and the Barbary Wars by emphasizing the
Manichean binaries I wish to avoid; see Joseph Wheelan, Jefferson’s War:
America’s First War on Terror, 1801–1805 (New York: Carroll and Graff,
2003); and Joshua E. London, Victory in Tripoli: How America’s War with
Barbary Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation (Hoboken, N.J.:
Wiley, 2005).
3 Paul Michel Baepler, introduction to White Slaves, African Masters: An
Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives, ed. Paul Michel
Baepler (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 24.
4 See Baepler, introduction to White Slaves, African Masters, 29–31.
5 For recent explorations of the homogenizing language of antebellum
American democracy in relation to the multicultural reality of the ante-
bellum nation, see Timothy Powell, Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural
Interpretation of the American Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
Univ. Press, 2000); and David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National
24  American Literature

Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minnesota: Univ. of

Minnesota Press, 2003).
6 According to William Robert Taylor, the word Yankee “quickly came to
stand for the traits of character which were thought to be most char-
acteristically American. In America the term was associated most fre-
quently with New Englanders, but in England and on the Continent it
was generally loosely applied to Americans. It carried with it the impli-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

cation of crass commercial dealings, shrewd bargaining and even a hint
of sharp practices” (Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American
National Character [New York: George Braziler, 1957], 48). On the lives
of eighteenth-century American sailors and their influence on the rise
of capitalism, see Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue
Sea: Merchant Sailors, Pirates, and the Anglo-American Maritime World,
1700–1750 (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1989). On the di-
rect relationship between sailors and the claims of the American Revolu-
tion, see Peter Lindbaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra:
The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon Press,
2001). On Americans in North Africa, see Louis B. Wright and Julia Mac-
leod, The First Americans in North Africa (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
Univ. Press, 1945).
7 J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis define “phantasy” as an “imaginary scene
in which the subject is protagonist, representing the fulfillment of a wish
(in the last analysis, an unconscious wish) in a manner that is distorted
to a greater or lesser extent by defensive processes” (The Language of
Psycho-analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith [London: Hogarth, 1973],
314). The phantasm of the nation, then, is this imaginary scene in which
the individual citizen imagines him- or herself as the protagonist in the
narrative of an idealized national identity, embodying simultaneously the
individual self and the national self. This wish fulfillment, though, is me-
diated by the defensive processes that recognize that identification with
a national self may mean identification with individual otherness in terms
of race, class, and gender, even as the process of national identification
seeks to eliminate these marks of otherness or ignore their presence.
8 For a concise account of the political fault lines in the language of plu-
ralist inclusion that later fractured mid-nineteenth-century U.S. politics,
see Powell, Ruthless Democracy.
9 For recent work on orientalism in relation to nineteenth-century Ameri-
can literature, see Hilton Obenzinger, American Palestine: Melville,
Twain, and Holy Land Mania (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press,
1999); and Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and
Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press,
1998). For earlier work on the subject, see Luther Luedtke, Nathaniel
Hawthorne and the Romance of the Orient (Bloomington: Univ. of Indi-
ana Press, 1989); and Dorothee Metlitsky Finkelstein, Melville’s Orienda
 American Captivity in Barbary  25

(New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961). For a discussion of U.S. political
discourse and U.S. orientalism, see Fuad Sha’ban, Islam and Arabs in
Early American Thought: Roots of Orientalism in America (Durham, N.C.:
Acorn Press, 1991).
10 American cultural studies increasingly places emphasis on imperial
citizenship and racial nationalism as integral components of antebellum
national identity politics; see, for example, Shelley Streeby, American

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berke-
ley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2002); Bruce A. Harvey,
American Geographics: U.S. Narratives and the Representation of the Non-
European World, 1830–1865 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Univ. Press, 2001);
and Kazanjian, Colonizing Trick.
11 See Robert J. Allison, introduction to The Crescent Obscured: The United
States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1995), xvii.
12 See David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Lit-
erature in America (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1991), 9.
13 See Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of
the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ.
Press, 1973).
14 Jonathan Cowdery, American Captives in Tripoli; or, Dr. Cowdery’s Jour-
nal in Miniature (1806), in White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology
of American Barbary Captivity Narratives, ed. Paul Michel Baepler (Chi-
cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 173.
15 William Ray, Horrors of Slavery, or, the American Tars in Tripoli Con-
taining an Account of the Loss and Capture of the United States Frigate
Philadelphia. . . . (1808), in White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology
of American Barbary Captivity Narratives, ed. Paul Michel Baepler (Chi-
cago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 173.
16 Ali Bey, who was Ray’s contemporary, provides a comparative descrip-
tion of the Bashaw of Tripoli, Yusef Caramanelli, offered from an (osten-
sibly) Muslim perspective: “He convened a long while with me, after
which we were served with tea, scents and perfumes and I received from
him all possible proofs of affection. After these ceremonies we separated
very much satisfied with each other; he prevented me from kissing his
hand as a Sovereign, but shook mine like a man” (The Travels of Ali Bey:
In Morocco, Tripoli, Cyprus, Egypt, Arabia, Syria, and Turkey, between the
Years 1803–1807 [Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1816], 260). Domingo Badia y
Leblich was Ali Bey el-Abbasi’s real name. He was in fact a Spaniard and
may have been a French spy, but these affiliations do not alter the rep-
resentation of the Bashaw of Tripoli that he circulated through his book,
even if they complicate his motivations.
17 The representation of Barbary inhabitants as either savage or overcivi-
lized persisted in American public discourse throughout the antebellum
26  American Literature

period. In an article in the Southern Literary Messenger, Robert Green-

how describes “[t]he Bey Hamouda” as “a man vastly superior to the gen-
erality of Barbary sovereigns, though free from none of the vices which
appear to have fixed their seat in that portion of the earth, he was yet
by no means their slave, being neither a brutal ruffian nor a luxurious
sybarite”; see The History and Present Condition of Tripoli: With Some
Accounts of Other Barbary States/Originally Published in the Southern Lit-

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

erary Messenger (Richmond, Va.: T. W. White, 1835), 15.
18 Ray, Horrors of Slavery, 19.
19 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sci-
ences (New York: Pantheon, 1971), 308.
20 John D. Foss, A Journal, of the Captivity and Sufferings of John Foss; Several
Years a Prisoner in Algiers. . . . (1798), in White Slaves, African Masters:
An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives, ed. Paul Michel
Baepler (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999), 92.
21 Foucault, The Order of Things, 309.
22 For a comparative analysis of eighteenth-century British conceptions of
race, see Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Differ-
ence in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: Univ. of Penn-
sylvania Press, 2000).
23 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785; reprint, New York:
Penguin, 1999), 169.
24 See, for example, Samuel G. Goodrich, The Second Book of History, Includ-
ing the Modern History of Europe, Africa, and Asia. . . . (Boston: Charles J.
Hendee, 1837), 150. For more on the significance for American cultural
studies of the Peter Parley tales, see Harvey, American Geographics.
25 Barbara Harlow, introduction to Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem,
trans. Myrna Godzich and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minne-
sota Press, 1986), 20.
26 Allan D. Austin, “ ‘There Are Good Men in America, But All Are Very
Ignorant of Africa’—and Its Muslims,” in African Muslims in Antebellum
America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles. ed. Allan D. Austin
(New York: Routledge, 1997), 11.
27 See Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the
Americas (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1998).
28 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Postcoloniality and Value,” in Literary
Theory Today, ed. Peter Collier and Helga Geyer-Ryan (New York: Rout-
ledge, 1997), 225, 227. For a discussion of the catachrestic space and
Spivak’s formulation of it, see Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture
(London: Routledge, 1990), 171–97.
29 See Horatio Alger Jr., Tattered Tom; Or, The Story of a Street Arab (Bos-
ton: Loring, 1871).
30 “As figments of the Western imagination,” writes John Michael, “the Ar-
ab’s romantic identity has been and continues to be terribly useful for
 American Captivity in Barbary  27

the maintenance of power” (“Beyond Us and Them: Identity and Terror

from an Arab American’s Perspective,” South Atlantic Quarterly 102 [fall
2003]: 704).
31 Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska
Press, 1986), 109; quoted in Bhabha, Location of Culture, 184–85.
32 Eliza Bradley, An Authentic Narrative of the Shipwreck and Sufferings of
Mrs. Eliza Bradley, the Wife of Capt. James Bradley of Liverpool. . . . (1820),

Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/american-literature/article-pdf/79/1/1/391693/AL079-01-01BermanFpp.pdf by guest on 19 October 2021

in White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Cap-
tivity Narratives, ed. Paul Michel Baepler (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago
Press, 1999), 255.
33 Ibid.
34 Allison details Cathcart’s many diplomatic mistakes and personal short-
comings, including being swindled by the French merchant Joseph
Famin in a 1796 American treaty with Tunis that he helped renegotiate;
see Crescent Obscured, 164–65.
35 Baepler, headnote to The Captives, in White Slaves, 103.
36 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1987). Further references are to this edition and will be cited par-
enthetically as TP.
37 William Lloyd Garrison, preface to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Doug-
lass (1845; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1997), 7.
38 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845; reprint, New York: Pen-
guin, 1997), 42.
39 Royall Tyler, The Algerine Captive; or The Life and Adventures of Doctor
Updike Underhill (1797; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2002), 128–
29.