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Elena Furlanetto

Elena Furlanetto earned her doctorate in American Literary and Cultural Studies from the Technical University of Dortmund in July 2015 and currently works as researcher at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She is the author of Towards Turkish American Literature: Narratives of Multiculturalism in Post-Imperial Turkey (2017) and a co-editor of A Poetics of Neurosis: Narratives of Normalcy and Disorder in Cultural and Literary Texts (with Dietmar Meinel 2018) as well as Media Agoras: Islamophobia and Inter/Multimedial Dissensus (with Frank Mehring, 2020). She has published on the influences of Islamic mystic poetry on American Transcendentalism, on Orientalism in Hollywood film, and on the captivity narrative. Her research and teaching interests also include postcolonial literatures, comparative empire studies, and poetry. Elena Furlanetto is writing her postdoctoral thesis in the framework of the DFG Research Unit ÒAmbiguitŠt und Unterscheidung: Historisch-kulturelle DynamikenÓ (Ambiguity and Difference: Historical and Cultural Dynamics). Her focus are dynamics of ÔambiguationÕ in the early and nineteenth-century Americas.

“Eternal Confusions in Another World”: American Captives and Imperial Vulnerability in Algiers

By | Published November 23, 2020

Geography History Research

“We are Distressed for you, O our BRETHREN, We are Distressed for you!” (3) Puritan minister Cotton Mather thunders in the opening of his “Pastoral Letter to the English Captives, in Africa” (1698). The letter addresses American captives in North Africa,[1] but Mather’s concern for their personal safety is only second to his preoccupation that they may “Renounce the Christian Religion” and become “wretched Renegado’s [sic]” (4-5). Mather’s pronouncements are a fitting introduction to the short readings of the Algerian captivities I propose in the following pages: Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797) and Maria Martin’s Captivity and Sufferings of Mrs. Maria Martin (1806); first and foremost, because Mather inaugurates the conjunction between apostasy and confusion, which Tyler and Martin ultimately turn into a triangulation of apostasy, confusion, and empire. Barbary figures such as the Muslim pirate or the renegade, when met face to face, prove to be far closer […]