scholarly journals Quixotism, Federalism, and the Question of American National Identity in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Dragoș Ivana
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
The Status ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
American Society

Abstract This article places Royall Tyler’s novel, The Algerine Captive, within the socio-political context of the early American Republic which was acutely concerned with the problem of defining its national identity. As a multi-genre text juxtaposing the picaresque format patterned after Henry Fielding’ Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones with the travelogue and the Barbary captivity narrative, The Algerine Captive is a novel which mirrors the incoherent and disjointed character of America in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, in formal as well as generic terms. By the same token, the variegated adventures of the protagonist/narrator Updike Underhill both at home and abroad reveal social, political, legal, religious and racial differences meant to challenge the Federal meaning of nation as an isolated and self-reliant land under the John Adams government. I examine the link between Tyler’s critique of Federalism taken as national insularity and the status of Updike Underhill as a quixotic character. His return to America as a patriotic citizen after escaping from slavery in Algiers is not a traditional quixotic “cure,” i.e. a return to the Federalist status quo. Underhill’s return to his native country enables him to make American society better, not by simply parroting federalist principles, but by upholding and testing cross-cultural differences and global experiences on native soil as a cosmopolitan citizen.

White Zombie as Captivity Narrative and the Death of Certainty

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Mark C Anderson
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Black ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Society ◽  
Black Other

Horror films such as White Zombie (1932) reveal viewers to themselves by narrating in the currency of audience anxiety. Such movies evoke fright because they recapitulate fear and trauma that audiences have already internalized or continue to experience, even if they are not aware of it. White Zombie’s particular tack conjures up an updated captivity narrative wherein a virginal white damsel is abducted by a savage Other. The shell of the captivity story, of course, is as old as America. In its earliest incarnation it featured American Indians in the role as savage Other, fiendishly imagined as having been desperate to get their clutches on white females and all that hey symbolized. In this way, it generated much of the emotional heat stoking Manifest Destiny, that is, American imperial conquest both of the continent and then, later, as in the case of Haiti, of the Caribbean Basin. White Zombie must of course be understood in the context of the American invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). As it revisits the terrain inhabited by the American black Other, it also speaks to the history of American slavery. The Other here is African-American, not surprisingly given the date and nature of American society of the day, typically imagined in wildly pejorative fashion in early American arts and culture. This essay explores White Zombie as a modified captivity narrative, pace Last of the Mohicans through John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the Rambo trilogy (1982, 1985, 1988), the Taken trilogy (2008, 1012, 2014), even Mario and Luigi’s efforts to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser.

The Know-nothing party, the protestant evangelical community and American national identity

1982 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 449-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Carwardine
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Territorial Expansion ◽  
Independent State ◽  
Irish Famine ◽  
The Future ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
American Society ◽  
Future Direction ◽  
American Nation

By the mid-nineteenth century, two generations after the revolution and the creation of an independent state, Americans were still unsure of the ultimate limits and character of their nation. If there was too much evident optimism over the country’s prospects to write of the nation’s suffering a crisis of identity, it is equally clear that the major questions of the 1840s and 1850s—territorial expansion, the future of slavery, and massive immigration—provided issues the precise resolution of which would fundamentally affect the future direction of the Union. Over the first two of these the evangelical protestant community, the dominant and most influential opinion-forming religious group in American society, found itself seriously divided; indeed by the eve of the civil war the slavery question had split all the major evangelical denominations. In contrast, this same community appeared to show much more cohesion and unanimity in defending the nation’s evangelicalism against the swollen tide of foreign immigrants, three million of whom poured into American ports between 1845 and 1854, the vast majority victims of Irish famine and refugees from the European revolutions of 1848. The immediate danger to American nationality, as evangelicals defined it, lay not in the immigrants’ poverty and foreignness, but in their Catholicism. The Lutheran minister, Frederick Anspach, likened the American nation to a virgin who should ‘sacredly guard her honor’ against catholic vampires who ‘would convert her into a courtezan for the Pope.’

scholarly journals Performing Political Persuasion in the United States in the Early Years of the Republic

2021 ◽  
pp. 61
Author(s):  
Tomas Kacer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
National Identity ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Early American ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Bunker Hill ◽  
Valley Forge

Theater productions were born out of a paradox in the United States of the Revolutionary War and shortly afterwards. While the nation’s dominant ideology was anti-theatrical, theater often served a nationalist agenda, co-defining the new American nation and its nascent identities – such were, for example, productions of Joseph Addison’s Cato at Valley Forge in 1778 and William Dunlap’s André at the New Park in New York in 1798. These theater events empowered the audience to publicly perform their national identity as Americans and exercise their republican fervor. Similarly, a production of Bunker-Hill by J. D. Burk at the Haymarket in Boston in 1797 was crucial in helping define the social and political identities of its audiences, who were motivated to attend the performances as an expression of their partisan preferences. This article shows that literary, theatrical and social practices served to constitute performatively the early American national identity.

A New Denominational Historiography?

1995 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-263
Author(s):  
John F. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Recent Analysis ◽  
General Factor ◽  
Religious Organization ◽  
Religious Institution ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Society ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Over the last decade, a noteworthy number of published studies have, in one fashion or another, been defined with reference to religious denominations. This is an arresting fact, for, coincidentally, the status of religious denominations in the society has been called into question. Some formerly powerful bodies have lost membership (at least relatively speaking) and now experience reduced influence, while newer forms of religious organization(s)—e.g., parachurch groups and loosely structured movements—have flourished. The most compelling recent analysis of religion in modern American society gives relatively little attention to them. Why, then, have publications in large numbers appeared, in scale almost seeming to be correlated inversely to this trend?No single answer to this question is adequate. Surely one general factor is that historians often “work out of phase” with contemporary social change. If denominations have been displaced as a form of religious institution in society in the late twentieth century, then their prominence in earlier eras is all the more intriguing.

Susanna Rowson’s Barbary Captivity Narrative, or the Struggle for the Freedom of American Women in Algiers

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 59-70
Author(s):  
Sabrina Zerar
Keyword(s):  
Power Relations ◽  
Don Quixote ◽  
Early American Republic ◽  
Sentimental Literature ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
American Women ◽  
Early American ◽  
Gender Power ◽  
The Many

This research explores the feminist dimensions of Rowson's play, Slaves in Algiers or, a struggle for freedom (1794), from historicist and dialogical perspectives. More particularly, it looks at the play within the context of the politics of the early American republic to uncover how Rowson deploys the captivity of American sailors in Algiers (1785-1796) as a pretext to deconstrust the established gender power relations without hurting the sensibilities of her audience in its reference to the issue of black slavery. The research also unveils the many intertextual relationships that the play holds with the prevalent captivity culture of the day, sentimental literature, and more specifically with Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

scholarly journals Gender and Migrant Roles in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Films: Cinema as an Apparatus of Reconfiguration of National Identity and ‘Otherness’

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Marianna Charitonidou
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Urban Studies ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
The Status ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Relationship

The article examines an ensemble of gender and migrant roles in post-war Neorealist and New Migrant Italian films. Its main objective is to analyze gender and placemaking practices in an ensemble of films, addressing these practices on a symbolic level. The main argument of the article is that the way gender and migrant roles were conceived in the Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Cinema was based on the intention to challenge certain stereotypes characterizing the understanding of national identity and ‘otherness’. The article presents how the roles of borgatari and women function as devices of reconceptualization of Italy’s identity, providing a fertile terrain for problematizing the relationship between migration studies, urban studies and gender studies. Special attention is paid to how migrants are related to the reconceptualization of Italy’s national narrations. The Neorealist model is understood here as a precursor of the narrative strategies that one encounters in numerous films belonging to the New Migrant cinema in Italy. The article also explores how certain aspects of more contemporary studies of migrant cinema in Italy could illuminate our understanding of Neorealist cinema and its relation to national narratives. To connect gender representation and migrant roles in Italian cinema, the article focuses on the analysis of the status of certain roles of women, paying particular attention to Anna Magnagi’s roles.

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