The study of captivities as an important transatlantic and transcultural phenomenon has recently received attention from scholars who explore chronologically and geographically diverse histories that range from the British Atlantic, the British northeast, and the Spanish southwest to the Ottoman Empire. In Writing Captivity in the Early Modern Atlantic, Lisa Voigt presents a fresh, compelling study of the ways in which captivity not only shaped imperial ideologies and practice in the early modern world but also redirected cultural perception of travel, violence, and the Other in the European imagination.
Eschewing more familiar analyses that emphasize the captivity experience itself, Voigt privileges the role of captivity narratives in first constructing and then conveying new forms of “knowing” worlds and peoples outside or newly incorporating them into European empires. A central and previously overlooked aspect of accounts of captives is its contribution to the rise of the novel and thus its pivotal place in creating a broadly received image of peoples and places that lay in the sights of a European imperial race for conquest.
According to Voigt, captivity narratives foreground the novel's emergence in their status as both “credible and pleasurable” (37). The wide circulation of this body of captivity literature introduced Europeans to landscapes and peoples fantastic yet rendered familiar through the mediation of the European captive. These captives interpreted their interactions with indigenous peoples in ways that reinforced the imperial and colonial impetus. Despite the cultural exchange and even syncretism that could occur within captivity, Voigt argues that these new “hybrid” figures of colonial authority “served to reinforce rather than undercut power inequalities” (32).
Central to Voigt's analysis is not only her close reading of the imperial agendas of captivity narratives but also the ways in which these messages were successfully transmitted to readers in Europe. Voigt deftly reveals that the ideologies of cultural superiority, colonial hierarchies, and social segregations were conveyed to a receptive imperial audience. Through her nuanced discussion of captivity literature, the reader cannot help but be drawn into the adventure and pleasure derived by European consumers of these texts, while at the same time shrinking from the horrific consequences engendered by the broad absorption and promotion of their colonial intent. The persistence of this analytical tension throughout the text reinforces Voigt's overarching argument about the insidious quality of captivity narratives in the establishment of colonial mentalities in the early modern world.
The power of such an argument becomes more convincing because of the comparative source materials Voigt deploys in this monograph. Rather than limiting the argument to a single imperial/colonial case study, the author effectively reminds her audience of how widespread the influence of European captivities and subsequent print manifestations of ex-captives’ stories actually was.
One of the most innovative aspects of Voigt's study remains the ways in which she skillfully analyzes Iberian and English captivity narratives to draw parallels between competing empires. While the author offers more examples of Iberian captivity texts than English, her comparison of the two empires is nonetheless compelling and thus begs that further comparative studies be undertaken. Colonial hegemony established through conquests predicated on knowledge produced in these narratives proved a linchpin in both English and Iberian examples. While most scholarship of the early modern world continues to juxtapose English, Spanish, and Portuguese patterns of exploration, conquest, and settlement, Voigt challenges her readers to reconsider the ways in which imperial knowledge about colonization itself circulated across the boundaries of empire. As the author notes, in the case of successful captivities that produced colonial domination, the English dismissed the Black Legend in order to “imitate” Spanish practice (330). Voigt concludes that the shared experience of captivities across European empires and the likewise common popularity and subsequent influence of print renditions of captivities served the ultimate purpose of forwarding imperial expansion and cementing colonial domination of indigenous peoples.
Lisa Voigt makes a compelling case that, in the early modern Atlantic world, exploration was widely accepted as the means by which knowledge was gained and that it was captivity narratives that became fixed in the European mind as the best source of authority via the most extreme form of exploration: forced participation in the worlds of the Other. Voigt's study creates original pathways for further study of the diffusion of knowledge between competing European empires that worked in concert to undergird the process of colonial conquest. While Voigt does locate the source of this knowledge in the cultures and authority of indigenous peoples, she leaves questions about the agencies, resistances, and accommodations of the colonized unanswered and opens the door for future scholarship that examines the ways in which indigenous peoples interpreted and responded to the presence of European captives in their midst and their own enslavement at the hands of colonists.
