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Deterritorialization, Pure War, And The Consequences Of Indian Captivity In Transnational Colonial Discourse, Billy J. Stratton

English and Literary Arts: Faculty Scholarship

The genre of the captivity narrative has operated as a vital circuit for transnational colonial discourse since its inception. Throughout the age of discovery, accounts of the captivity became an indispensible means of connecting the European metropole to foreign lands in Asia and Africa, as well as North and South America. The development of the Indian captivity narrative within the Atlantic context functioned as an effective tool for the dissemination of knowledge concerning the New World and its Indigenous inhabitants. In this essay, I examine some of the ways in which the captivity narrative functions as a colonial apparatus vital …