Abstract
Focusing on fiction about U.S. conflicts with North African regencies, this chapter explores American literature’s critique of the state’s reaction to its inability to safeguard neither the welfare of its citizens nor the nation’s economic interests. The centralized state that emerges as an immunitary solution to these problems was seen by some as posing a direct threat to local sovereignty and freedom.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
For analyses of the U.S. wars with North African states, see Robert Allison, The Crescent Obscured, Frank Lambert, The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World, Malini Johar Schueller, U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890, Robert Baepler, White Slaves, African Masters, and Jacob Berman, American Arabesques.
- 2.
As Edward Said argues, orientalism is not about the Orient, so much as it is about a set of discourses whose institutionalized legitimacy helped consolidate ways of seeing and thinking that in turn contributed to the deployment of power. However, Said thought that orientalism did not find root on U.S. soil: “The American experience of the Orient prior to that exceptional [WWII] moment was limited. Cultural isolatos like Melville were interested in it; cynics like Mark Twain visited and wrote about it; The American Transcendentalists saw affinities between Indian thought and their own; a few theologians and Biblical students studied the Biblical Oriental languages; there were occasional diplomatic and military encounters with Barbary pirates and the like, the odd naval expedition to the Far Orient, and of course the ubiquitous missionary to the Orient. But there was no deeply invested tradition of Orientalism, and consequently in the United States knowledge of the Orient never passed through the refining and reticulating and reconstructing process, whose beginning was in philological study, that it went through in Europe. Furthermore, the imaginative investment was never made either, perhaps because the American frontier, the one that counted, was the westward one.” Orientalism, 290.
- 3.
Martha Rojas points out, “the public, particularly people living in large coastal towns and cities, organized relief societies and petitioned the federal government to act more quickly and effectively. An outraged public donated hundreds of dollars to send provisions and contribute to the necessary ransoms,” 160.
- 4.
For a discussion of “constituent power,” see Antonio Negri’s Insurgencies.
- 5.
For Bailyn, “the American Constitution is the final and climactic expression of the ideology of the American Revolution,” 321. For Arendt, the revolution culminates with the organization converting constituent power into constitutional order. See Arendt’s On Revolution.
- 6.
Extimacy is Jacques Lacan’s term for an existence which stands apart from, insisting from outside the symbolic order. On Lacan’s neologism for external intimacy, Slavoj Zizek writes, “the symbolic order is striving for a homeostatic balance, but there in its kernel, at its very center, some strange, traumatic element which cannot be symbolized, integrated into the symbolic order – the Thing.” The Sublime Object of Ideology, 132.
- 7.
Joyce Appleby writes, “Orators at civic feasts held in honor of French victories reminded audiences that the enemies of France were ‘Royalists and Aristocrats associated for the express purpose of expelling the rights of Man from the world.’ These demonstrations of support for the French Revolution were often accompanied by angry denunciations of administration policies, which were now interpreted as unwarrantedly pro English,” 54–5.
- 8.
Hamilton, Federalist 27.
- 9.
Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, 201.
- 10.
See Robert Allison’s The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815, 3–7.
- 11.
Gardner, 27.
- 12.
Brutus, 384.
- 13.
Lacan writes, “the phallus … is the signifier of the very loss the subject suffers due to the fragmentation brought on by the signifier, and nowhere does the counterpart function—by which an object is led into the subordination of desire to the symbolic dialectic—appear in a more decisive manner,” 599.
- 14.
Cathcart, 119.
Works Cited
Adams, John. 1903–4. Letter to Jefferson, July 31, 1786. In The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Lipscomb, vol. 10 of 20. Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association.
Allison, Robert. 2000. The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World, 1776–1815. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Bailyn, Bernard. 1992. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Enlarged ed. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Berman, Jacob Rama. 2012. American Arabesques: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth-Century Imaginary. New York: New York University Press.
Brutus. 2003. No. 6. In The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers, ed. David Wooton. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Castronovo, Russ. 2000. Political Necrophilia. Boundary 2 27 (2): 113–148.
Cathcart, James Leander. 1999. The Captives, Eleven Years in Algiers. In White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives, ed. Paul Baepler. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Davidson, Cathy. 1986. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Derrida, Jacques. 2005. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Freud, Sigmund. 1961. Humor. In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. James Strachey. XXI. London: Hogarth.
———. 2002. The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. Trans. Joyce Crick. New York: Penguin.
Gardner, Jared. 1998. Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Grosrichard, Alain. 1997. The Sultan’s Court: European Fantasies of the East. Trans. Liz Heron. New York: Verso.
Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. 2009. The Federalist Papers, ed. Ian Shapiro. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Jefferson, Thomas. 1903–4. Letter to John Adams, July 11, 1786. In The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew Lipscomb, vol. 10 of 20. Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association.
———. 2011. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. H. A. Washington, vol. 2. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lacan, Jacques. 2006. In Memory of Ernst Jones: On His Theory of Symbolism. In Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton.
Lambert, Frank. 2005. The Barbary Wars: American Independence in the Atlantic World. New York: Hill and Wang.
Negri, Antonio. 1999. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Trans. Maurizia Boscagli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Rojas, Martha Elena. 2003. ‘Insults Unpunished’: Barbary Captives, American Slaves, and the Negotiations of Liberty. Early American Studies; An Interdisciplinary Journal 1 (2): 159–186.
Rowson, Susanna Haswell. 1995. Slaves in Algiers. 1794. Plays by Early American Women, 1775–1850, ed. Amelia Howe Kritzer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Schueller, Malini Johar. 1998. U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Tyler, Royall. 1967. The Algerine Captive; or, the Life and Adventures of Doctor Updike Underhill, Six Years a Prisoner Among the Algerines. 1797. ed. Jack B. Moore. Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles.
Zizek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Rodriguez, R. (2019). Algerian Captivity and State Autoimmunity. In: Immunity's Sovereignty and Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Pivotal Studies in the Global American Literary Imagination. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34013-1_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34013-1_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34012-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34013-1
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)