Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography

An Interview with Nancy Armstrong,  Coauthor of The Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life

by Megan Behrent

Published September 2019

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Nancy Armstrong is Gilbert, Louis, and Edward Lehrman Professor of Trinity College, Duke University; editor of Novel: A Forum on Fiction; author of Desire and Domestic Fiction (1987), Fiction in the Age of Photography (1999), How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism, 1719-1900 (2005); and with Leonard Tennenhouse, coauthor of The Imaginary Puritan (1992)and Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing (2017).

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Megan Behrent: InThe Imaginary Puritan: Literature, Intellectual Labor, and the Origins of Personal Life and later in "Captivity and Cultural Capital in the English language Novel" you explored the influence of early American captivity narratives on the development of the English language novel, arguing that the captivity narrative played an of import function in the development of "what Bridegroom Anderson calls 'an imagined community,' the footing at one time for a new concept of nationality and for a new ruling form." Can you say more most how you lot came to this understanding of the role of captivity narratives inside the cultural capital of the period?

Nancy Armstrong: The curt answer: I grew up on Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser, and the theory of narrative that they fostered, and then I assume that the story of a customs's origins offers a way for that community to make sense of itself to itself. For the British in early America, this meant making sense of the fact that they were the violent invaders rather than the people built-in from American soil (the autochthone). The captivity narrative transformed the British role into that of the righteous protector of womanhood (defensive violence) and bearer of domestic civilisation (aka civilization). This same redefinition of violence against a people equally violence in defense of womanhood has been updated and reproduced through the centuries to legitimate the violence of a white (though certainly no longer British) ruling class over and over confronting successive immigrant waves, besides as those marked as racially and culturally other. This narrative inflected the American notion of freedom with a sense of religious entitlement from the first, making the property acquired through primitive accumulation (this includes slavery, as well as country-grabbing and more recent forms of American imperialism) equivalent in prestige to inherited belongings.

I will insist, though, that I did not stumble upon a symptomatic reading of the captivity narrative but went to early American civilisation with a pretty clear thought of what I wanted to notice. I had recently finished my account of the rise of the English novel as instrumental in the rise of a new feminine platonic and the hegemonic formation of an English language household nether her management, and so came to early American literature looking for "the earlier" of a before-and-after story for which I already knew "the after." I had a hunch that I'd find the past of British domestic fiction in the settler colonies of North America where English men and women were called on to make both a new kind of domestic unit and a community equanimous of such units. Thus, information technology wasn't long before I spotted what I was looking for in the recurrent course of the American captivity narrative—the very principle at work in such British novels as Richardson'due south Pamela and Clarissa and Radcliffe'due south Mysteries of Udolpho.

My first chance to lay out the statement connecting these two strands of Anglo American cultural history came as an invitation to evangelize a plenary talk at an annual meeting of the Northeast Eighteenth-Century Social club of America in the late 1980s. What seemed and so obvious to me—the thought that a adult female in danger of losing the qualities that entitled her to form an English household could be a rhetorical musical instrument of mod nation making—struck my audience every bit preposterous. The process of figuring out why I was so baffled by this response was almost as important as my time in the archive in determining how I was going to think about the early novel. To discover my proposal preposterous, I reasoned, my audience had assumed that England and what eventually became the United States had each sprung from a different cultural source. Only if they idea of Great Britain and British North America, non as a single nation, simply as separate from the start could my audition then assume that the features that gave each culture a singled-out identity would be located at its core, non its periphery.

To challenge this tenacious pair of assumptions, I wrote a number of articles that showed how the figure of an articulate young Englishwoman—convict to the protocols of an sometime ruling class (i.eastward. the exchange of women) and besieged past libertines—was simply a British rewriting of the puritan woman held captive in British North America. In thus further secularizing the puritan version of the holy female parent, the heroine of the captivity narrative provided an English nation undergoing modernization with the same sort of "culture bearer" that Annette Weiner calls the "inalienable possession" of potlatch cultures—the one thing a tribe cannot requite away without losing its identity as such. Forged in the settler colonies of Northward America, this figure fabricated an important contribution to the colonial apparatus of the British Empire over the course of two centuries and throughout the colonies. The same cultural logic that shaped this figure also shaped such memorable characters as Clarissa Harlowe (of course), Fanny Toll, Jane Eyre, Lucy Westenra (Dracula), Adela (Passage to Bharat), and "the honey" in Heart of Darkness.

MB : That explains how you lot arrived at this insight, but could y'all now tell me how this figure of the convict adult female or "culture bearer," as you describe her, can both reinforce the colonial projection of the British Empire and consolidate a modern ruling class at dwelling house?

NA : Whenever they put a young Englishwoman in danger of contamination past Native Americans (and an occasional Papist), American captivity narratives put the very essence of Englishness at risk, reversing the bodily relation of Native victim to British victimizer and justifying the slaughter of indigenous peoples wherever the English language went. (The Australian legend of Hanging Rock is some other case.) To appropriate the captivity narrative for the emergent centre classes, the sentimental British novel simply played information technology out on a unlike cultural stage. Set in an English manor house, the set on on the daughters of the respectable classes carried out by a libertine displaying the degenerate inclinations of the traditional elite tested the very features that women of the aspiring classes brought to the spousal relationship market.

As the heroine of a domestic novel, a woman whose only armor was her literary taste and morality was able to rally the reading public to the defense of what would go, by the fourth dimension of the Brontës, a single-family household. When managed by such a woman, this household established the Victorian norm and, past way of that domestic unit, a model of what Hannah Arendt calls "national housekeeping" (The Human Condition). To threaten the women was to threaten the family unit and thus to threaten the nation itself. I hear the electric current attempt, throughout the West, to equate immigrants with "rapists" or "terrorists" sounding much the same note of white nationalism as D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. This moving picture updates the Native American with the emancipated slave as the figure of the rapist, the electric current wave of xenophobia demonizes the Muslim and, in the US, the Latin American. By contrast, the Anglo ethnicity of the caught woman remains pretty much the same.

You're right of course to inquire how the same captivity narrative could not only invoke a sense of nationalism in a colonial context but besides consolidate a new ruling grade back in England: Aren't the two forms of amalgamation somehow opposed? How this narrative could work in the aforementioned way and notwithstanding produce two very different results becomes apparent when we recollect how novelists like Nathaniel Hawthorne and Susanna Rowson reversed the relation of Englishwoman to Native to show under what atmospheric condition the colonial figure of British womanhood could go dwelling once more to England. Having "gone native," Hester Prynne herself, like Charlotte Temple earlier her, is too contaminated to occupy the position of domestic woman in the nation of her origin. By contrast, Hester's daughter is a product of a colonial liaison betwixt ii British people, Hester's girl, similar Charlotte's receives the approval of her English father and undergoes a magical transformation that removes the stain of creolization so that she tin can repossess her English parentage. If nineteenth and early twentieth-novels presume the very men and women who represent the English way of life on other continents are culturally tainted, then Conrad's colonial adventurers discover dark inclinations within themselves that dispose them to become native.

By instigating much the aforementioned spirit of (white) nationalism at home as in the colonies, the captivity narrative achieved ii things at once: Information technology differentiated each British nation from every other, and it did so in a way that solidified England's status as the cultural core in relation both to its Celtic periphery and to the present and erstwhile British colonies.

MB : To this point, we've focused on the puritan or Mary Rowlandson narrative—which raises the question of how later traditions of captivity narratives claiming the cultural authorization of Mary Rowlandson'due south. I'm thinking, for example, of the 1824 bestseller The Life of Mary Jemison equally told to (and written by) James E. Seaver which features a captive adopted past the Seneca. Jemison is twice married to Seneca men with whom she bears children. In your more recent work with Leonard Tennenhouse, Novels in the Time of Democratic Writing: The American Instance, you shift your focus from puritan and secular versions of the American captivity narrative to the imported form of the Barbary captivity narrative. What outcome does this shift have on your political understanding of the community to which readers were invited to imagine themselves belonging in this catamenia of American history?

NA : In writing The Imaginary Puritan, Len and I became keenly aware that, inside a decade after ratification of the United states of america Constitution, the relation of the captivity narrative to the popular sense of nationalism was understandably no longer the aforementioned. In an ALH essay published in 2008 ("The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel"), we tackled the question of how the relation between national identity and the course of the American captivity narrative changed as British North American went from a loose and internally conflicted cluster of British colonies (each leap to the British Government past its own charter) to a nation of semi-autonomous states (each jump to its citizenry past state laws and bound to each other past a loose and internally conflicted grade of authorities). You betoken to the fact that information technology was only afterward that we took into business relationship the contemporaneous appearance of 2 other forms of captivity narrative, ane of which seemed diametrically opposed to the Mary Rowlandson story.

The acknowledged account of Mary Jemison'southward captivity, published in 1824, featured the same scenario—a woman of British (Irish) origins taken in 1753 from her home by a raiding political party of French and Native Americans—but to a very different consequence. Jemison'due south account, equally told to the Reverend Seaver, does not counterbalance a future in heaven over survival in this earth. Having been taken captive, Jemison was adopted into one Indian family, married off to another, and when that married man died on their render to his tribal home, she married a Seneca and bore him six children. If Mary Rowlandson's narrative made national identity a affair of (racial) purity-or-decease, and so Mary Jemison's valued cultural assimilation and endurance of incredible hardship for an uncertain hereafter over both purity and death. Nosotros felt at the time that it was about likewise like shooting fish in a barrel to see the shift from the one set of narrative priorities (ethnic purity) to the other (hybridization) as a recalibration of British colonial identity for an emergent American nationalism. Our most recent work identifies three factors that confirm that impression.

First of all, the catamenia when Mary Jemison's story was circulated in print was the same period when republication of Mary Rowlandson's story peaked. The early nineteenth-century readership was obviously hungry for both.

Second, American seduction stories (vs. their British counterparts) anticipated a heroine who, similar Jemison and Hester Prynne, earns her status as heroine past "going native." While Susanna Rowson and Hannah Foster do condemn their respective heroines to ignominious deaths, they practice so in guild to resurrect them every bit the heroines of seduction novels. This heroine is at once too sociable and trusting to survive in a earth of strangers and so genial and deserving of sympathy equally to provide the subject field of a cautionary tale. At least iii decades earlier Mary Jemison'southward story appeared in impress, American seduction novels had used sure elements of that story to modify the Rowlandson narrative. Why did these stories brand readers hope against promise that the heroine would survive a pregnancy unsanctioned by wedlock, unless these authors wanted to shift the value of human life from its traditional origins—whether in British blood or Christian soul—to the uncongenial American soil where these women had to live and die? Even before the Jemison story appeared in print, then, the two forms of captivity narrative were coming to an accommodation whereby they combined forces.

Arguably any culture—from tribal and classical myth to the Oedipal organisation of the modern unconscious—tells stories nearly itself that symbolically resolve that culture'southward foundational contradictions. Information technology'south relatively easy to see how an affiliation of the two prevalent forms of captivity narratives could have done merely that for the new US civilization in the two decades following ratification of the Constitution. Or rather, information technology would be like shooting fish in a barrel, were it non for the fact that a tertiary variety of this narrative, the Barbary Captivity narrative, enjoyed a surge of popularity during the heyday of the Rowlandson and Jemison stories. As the American novel incorporated this "strange" narrative, the opposition between two indigenous accounts—one of a woman of British origins who maintains her ticket to Protestant heaven (Mary Rowlandson) and some other of a adult female who keeps both her scalp and a position within a tribal community (Mary Jemison)—complanate. These arguments entered into a continuing contend over the character of the new nation and whether it was a pure or hybrid form of Englishness.

Both American narratives are opposed in this respect to the imported Barbary narrative, which pitted Americans against lawless international forces that threatened to strip the convict protagonist of the privileges and protections of U.s.a. citizenship. Royall Tyler'due south The Algerine Captive (1797) lays out this new configuration better than I can. The novel's showtime section makes it impossible for someone from a northern land to make a home for himself in some other region of the country, especially the American Southward, prompting the protagonist to enlist as a transport'southward dr. and live on international waters. He is not on the high seas for more a couple pages, however, earlier the ship's crew and passengers are kidnapped and held for ransom past Algerine pirates. The protagonist goes through something like an inversion of the middle passage, where he suffers forth with an international mix of passengers and a cargo of slaves and comes away with an invigorated conviction that "all men are brothers." When it looks like his ransom is finally going to materialize, he is just besides happy to render to the US.

Tempting as it was to read the relationship betwixt the Rowlandson and Jemison narratives every bit the simple displacement of a colonial narrative by an indigenized national narrative, nosotros found that the interaction of these three varieties of captivity narrative called for united states to rethink the tension between the two Mary stories together forming one side of a new opposition. One time we saw that the Barbary narrative offered an outside view in contrast to the inside view of what it means to be American provided by the Mary stories, we understood that the appearance of the two narratives in print at almost the aforementioned fourth dimension heralded the emergence of a new national narrative: an American who was not only rooted in national soil but also untethered from country and free to travel in the world without losing the rights and prerogatives of a citizen.

MB: In "Captivity and Cultural Capital in the English Novel" (1998), you hash out how 1970s feminisms redefined the home as a form of captivity from which the "ideal of the housewife" must be liberated, despite limitations in this journeying from captivity to emancipation. In that commodity, yous explore some of these contradictions through an assay of films from the 1990s. What impact has feminism had on the captivity narrative?

NA: In the 1970's, feminism embraced the ideology of the captivity narrative past proclaiming the domestic woman a captive in the household. This was done in the proper name of arguing for intellectual recognition and economical opportunity based on the fact that women lacked the recognition and the attendant opportunities available to their male counterparts. Past "lack," I'k non referring to some biological deviation but rather to what Wendy Chocolate-brown calls "a country of injury"—that is to say, the lack of masculine social, psychological, and intellectual attributes that modern cultures attribute to those who happen to be biologically female. Maintained by male person dominated institutions, this cultural "injury" may well involve physical injury merely more oft makes itself felt by means of derogatory attitudes toward women, infantilizing stereotypes, and the limitation on income and positions of authority available to those that eschew domestic captivity, non to mention the legal measures that enforce masculine dominance. You tin run into where Mary Jemison's options were no less limited in this respect than Mary Rowlandson's. In turning the captivity narrative against a definition of femininity that subordinates women to men, feminism has never quite managed to avoid the backfire that accompanies the sudden reversal of that narrative.

This became especially articulate during the 1980's and 1990's, equally feminism mounted an statement against the gender essentialism that fabricated women out to be victims of biological difference and argued that they were victims of ideology instead—victims of the very credo they had reproduced for over a century. Throughout modern history, we asked, haven't women been at least every bit responsible as men for enforcing normative stereotypes of women as homebodies and helpmates who realize themselves in supplementing masculine labor and reproducing the gendered roles of producer and reproducer/consumer in the next generation? Non biological difference, we claimed, but these stereotypes and the attitudes, protocols of the workplace, and sex-biased laws they rationalize hold women captive to a political-economic society dominated past men. This turn against the thought that sexuality was a state of nature vs. civilisation actually did little to liberate us from the double bind encapsulated in the American captivity narrative and its British variations.

My reading of the progression of pop film star Demi Moore's role from Ghost (1990) through A Few Practiced Men (1992) and Disclosure (1994) to G.I. Jane (1997) expressed that realization. I saw the metamorphosis of the woman she embodied—from the besieged sentimental adult female, to the moral reformer of military constabulary, to the corporate executive and sexual predator, a conflict that achieves an uneasy compromise in GI Jane, when Moore becomes the outset female Navy seal. This progression shows how speedily the figure of the captive can flip over and go the predator in relation to the male victim, all the more monstrous for assuming the form of a female person. Feminist criticism was subject to the same reversibility.

Permit a critic attempt to expose the double bind embodied in the convict woman, and that critic would notice herself stuck in the bog of "woman's nature," correct forth with those we argued against—namely, those who drew authority from the gender norm. I find Wendy Brown especially articulate on how this double bind continues to befuddle feminism into the present century. Every bit presently constituted, feminism presupposes a social injury—some denial of equal rights, Chocolate-brown maintains, essential to our identity every bit women. From this information technology follows that if women insist on redressing the very injury that defines them every bit women, and then, every bit Dark-brown says, those women are likely to be "maligned every bit selfish, irresponsible, or often, more to the point, simply unfeminine" (Undoing the Demos 158). Under what atmospheric condition, are the genders of victim and victimizer really all that reversible today?

MB: How do gimmicky fiction and popular culture update the double bind in which it places women, especially in the era of #MeToo? One of the inspirations for this special effect is the continued prevalence of captivity themed narratives in popular culture and the news—do yous accept whatever thoughts on gimmicky iterations of the genre?

NA: Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg calls for women in the upper levels of technological workplaces to "lean in" rather than to "hang back." By enjoining women to stop existence women and enter the ranks of man economicus, Sandburg implies that women will be economic losers unless they behave like men. Taking effect with Sandberg'due south position that women have to behave like men in guild to earn the aforementioned pay, Michelle Obama recently argued for a compromise formation. Obama contended that women demand a cooperative partnership at home if they wanted to avoid doing double duty as unpaid homemaker and salaried professional, a situation that maintains traditional femininity by giving the advantage to male coworkers to be competitive every bit a salaried professional without neglecting their role as homemaker. The choice between the positions endorsed by Sandberg and Obama is not all that different from the selection between Mary Jemison's pragmatic hybridity and Mary Rowlandson'southward uncompromising femininity in that information technology is not really a choice at all. Either the woman sacrifices her womanhood—that is, goes native—and becomes a man to compete in the workplace, or they fifty-fifty the scales by requiring male partners to take on feminine responsibilities at home—ballbusters either way. More than to the point, in either case, they maintain the single-family dwelling as the foundational socio-economical unit of modern societies.

Under conditions of neoliberalism, neo-conservatism and gratuitous market economics converge on this one issue—that the single-family home should be held responsible for the health, education, and welfare of the national population. This became the rationale for repealing what remained of the welfare land. The single-family unit household sustained past the woman'due south unpaid labor has consequently become the indebted household, bequeathing enormous debt along with its investments in the economic future to successive generations. While I have no authoritative statistics to back up this claim, in that location is no question in my mind that the number of sustainable households with a single breadwinner has precipitously declined in the last thirty years or and then, along with the number of households that tin can afford to hire domestic labor. Thus, it is unlikely that the options discussed past Sandburg and Obama are bachelor to more than than x% percent of the population in developed nations. Their argument does tell us, however, that men and women are entering a very different workplace today than the industrial workplace from which women were banished to the household over a century and a one-half agone.

How did the social graphic symbol of the workplace, including the academy, take to change before women could demand admission to the top echelons of direction? With the decreasing number of people employed in productive labor, and a respective increase in jobs in diverse fields of technology, the service professions, and the near basic skills once sequestered within the domestic unit, has the demand for equal pay indeed been inching toward its goal? If so, we must inquire, for whom is information technology succeeding? We know that the income gap within the male person labor force has widened and deepened since the 1980s, but I am guessing (these statistics are rarely aired) that the gap inside the ranks of women between those at the top and those at the bottom of the income ladder is wider and deeper than the gap betwixt men and women of equal rank. If nosotros consider merely the x% or less of the population climbing their ways into relatively secure high paying jobs, we could and so probably say that women every bit a grouping constitute an underpaid majority.

All the same underpaid we may or may not be, would those of united states in university positions recall of exchanging our positions in the contemporary workforce for those of gardening, cooking meals, caring for children, or cleaning business firm for salaried professionals? To the contrary, we now depend on a supply of infinitely replaceable workers to perform forms of feminized labor for pay that, through the 1950s, women supposedly performed for the sheer honey of family and abode. If it was once in her capacity as an unpaid, fulltime household manager that the modern woman performed as the national culture bearer, and so who we must inquire, fills that role now? Has the disappearance of the form of servitude to which the postwar economy had condemned women as their patriotic duty and source of gratification macerated the power inhering in the figure of the captive adult female? If so, what power, if whatsoever inheres in a feminist critique? Is that power nonetheless contingent, every bit Brown says, on addressing an injury, that should women address information technology, defines them as aggressive, masculine, even monstrous? To address this final question, I want to consider briefly who plays the victim and who the savage in the captivity narrative as it tends to be mobilized by today's media.

This question is, if annihilation, too easy to answer, because the respond depends entirely on who is mobilizing the captivity narrative. To go by the right and alt-right media, the straight white male person is the unemployed and disenfranchised victim of an institutional elite composed of trained government officials and overeducated bureaucrats in full general, who might besides be women insofar equally they work side by side with, if not under women. Despite Hillary Clinton's arrogance in assuming the position of caput of the liberal party was rightfully hers, despite, besides, the unqualified back up for her candidacy by the liberal media and her ability to concenter a popular majority, she was destined to lose. Apparently just enough people voted for Trump because he was non Hillary, thus not an educated woman, to earn him the votes necessary in the electoral college. There is no question, notwithstanding, that these factors would not have been enough, had he not done such a masterful job of refiguring his own masculine monstrosity—as pussy grabber, corrupt businessman, incompetent politician, and psychologically unstable—as that of his female person opponent. Hence Hillary was a "facilitator" of her husband'south peccadillos, a "crooked" business adult female in league with strange powers, a careless custodian of national security, a policy wonk, and a "low energy" individual to boot. What daily proved to be adequate qualities in a male candidate for U.s. President made her many times a monster who came to embody the very qualities responsible for victimizing the forgotten and very angry directly white American male.

This delicate balancing act requires a trickster—not learned behavior merely a capacity to occupy simultaneously the positions of victim and groovy. If reactionary white male nationalism appropriated the ability of the victim in relation to the neoliberal professional classes embodied in the monstrous figure of Hillary Clinton, then that same make of nationalism reclaims its masculinity in an utterly traditional way by saving white America from the rapists, drug dealers, and carriers of infectious disease summed upward in the apocalyptic figure of a wave of migrants pouring over the United states-United mexican states border. In these charges we can hear the vocalism of white colonial culture challenge, as Gayatri Spivak said of the British in India, to rescue brown women from the abuses of brown men. Should this collusion of a damaged personality type with a national narrative seem also powerful to resist, nosotros should recollect the reversibility inherent in the effigy of the captive.

In the wake of Hillary's defeat, we saw panoramic television displays of pussy-hat demonstrations across the US and Western Europe. In a number of highly publicized constabulary suits against male person predators in the amusement business organization, we saw the willingness of women to mount successful law suits and media campaigns against prominent figures in amusement and authorities. But only time volition tell whether the bullying ability of the media necessarily works on behalf of women or against them. The compelling legal testimony of Christine Blasey Ford against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh—a woman mobilizing the strength of a Senate hearing and sympathetic media—could neither prevent the counterassault on herself and family by social media nor prevent the man she accused from making a successful merits that he was the victim. It was as if nothing had changed from the time of Anita Hill's testimony at the Clarence Thomas hearings 30-five years ago. The number of women who flooded the twitter sphere with similar stories was marshalled in support of a narrative that men are beingness tried and found guilty on the basis of uncorroborated rumor, innuendo, and spotty retentivity. I confess that I'one thousand relieved that #MeToo stopped just short of the tipping point where it might have ceased to operate equally a therapeutic medium and get another form of cyber bullying. Were this to happen, it would certainly blunt the most important political weapon in its arsenal, which is the collective power to button for, publicize, and advance the case police on sexual harassment and set on. Hence my question: if neither the economically powerful male person predator nor his professional female casualty is in any real sense the victim of a captivity narrative that each claims to exist, then who plays the captive now?

Two things remain consistent throughout the many role reversals that have accompanied the mischaracterizations of captive and predator in the American captivity narrative. These are the tightly related tropes of mischaracterization and reversibility themselves. Assuming that the well-nigh extravagant mischaracterization of captive and predator indicates the greatest potential for their reversal, I would urge united states to look for the about egregious distortions of those roles that are now contending for media prominence. I would eliminate our current President on grounds that he is the atypical effigy of mischaracterization itself—both the white male victim and the bully who takes no prisoners—and therefore not the face of those who are probable to be so classified. This leaves two choices for the role of victim on today'due south cultural horizon: the abused professional women who rally around the flag of #MeToo and the caravan of refugees who have traveled the length of Mexico in search of aviary. Where the one is a socially limited but culturally advantaged group of professional adult female who detect themselves in a workplace where they can exist put in their places as women by powerful men, the other is a migrant population of disposable labor, a effigy that tends to remain invisible unless demonized or until they dice (photographically) spectacular deaths at the hands of Americans who were supposed to provide asylum. (Mis)characterized by the correct equally potential rapists, from whom American men must salvage American women, today's migrant actually occupies the role of the feminized captive. Withal thinking in terms of the American captivity narrative, this development conspicuously puts united states in new cultural territory.

The captivity narrative served as a foundational fiction past legitimating the British defense of hearth and domicile in a "wilderness," thereby owning and privatizing what was someone else's land. In doing, so it gave the British a form of novel they could employ to merits cultural superiority over a licentious aristocracy, as well as to the native populations they colonized. In a period when whole populations are on the move across the earth, as well as in Central America, however, the concept of disposable labor is rapidly displacing unpaid domestic labor. Today's corporate civilisation depends on this invisible labor force to maintain, tear down, remake, clean, and supply the depersonalized spaces that many of today'southward salaried professionals consider home. To acknowledge this general disavowed partnership between confused populations and the international corporate culture ultimately responsible for dislocating them, recent novels decline the traditional obligation to perform the heterosexual negotiations composing the spousal relationship plot in society to demonstrate the involuntary interdependence of the migrant and the men and women of the new professional-managerial class. As early as the novels of Octavia Butler that inspired Donna Haraway'south effigy of the Cyborg, novels had begun to think in earnest that information technology was non their job to reproduce the modern bourgeois family as both the model and bones unit of a national community, and a whole range of novels from Don DeLillo'south classic Underworld, to Jennifer Egan's A Visit From the Goon Team, Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Joseph O'Neil'due south Netherland, Colson Whitehead's Zone One and Underground Railroad, and my personal favorite, Rachel Kushner'due south The Mars Room go far impossible to imagine such a community taking shape.

This plot not only shows precisely how the human relationship of the ii allows the latter to exploit the infinitely replaceable, underpaid, and feminized migrant labor force; it also exposes that there is just a national edge to distinguish those on whose feminized labor we depend for traditional homemaking and the migrants who are currently being demonized every bit rapists, criminals, and drug dealers. Whether inside or outside that boundary, insofar every bit they embody potential citizenship, they also augur a qualitative transformation of geopolitical categories, which might be seen every bit a reversal of the starting time and second waves of European colonialism. Although a historical change of this magnitude is understandably figured in monstrous terms, the actors in the scenario of the captivity narrative embodied this potential from the very first. Indeed, rather than a valiant stand of white American men confronting the conflicting hoard, nosotros hear reports and see images of children in cages surrounded by US clearing officials. This, I would fence, suggests that the captivity narrative is once again gathering together the historical materials at hand in lodge to resituate the question of national identity on an international terrain. Chances are good that the figure of the migrant equally potential citizen volition eventually assume the role of captive under assail by hostile forms of nationalism. One can only hope.

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