Barbary(an) Invasions: The North African Figure in Republican Print Culture

"Barbary(an) Invasions" focuses specifically on the use of Barbary Muslim pseudonyms in American print culture in the late eighteenth century. Framing this chapter is the critical debate between republican public sphere ideology as developed by Michael Warner and the more recent materialist challenge posed by Trish Loughran, who emphasizes the persistently local identities of the late eighteenth century. Reading Benjamin Franklin’s Historicus letter (1790), Peter Markoe’s The Algerine Spy in Pennsylvania (1787) and Washington Irving’s Mustapha letters from Salmagundi (1807-8), this chapter focuses on how authors imagined the North African figure speaking as a strategy to disrupt the ideological conventions of the public sphere. By focusing on the Barbary as what Emily Apter calls a “translation zone,” these writers mediated the relationship between the local and the national by way of the transatlantic.