Peter Parley in Tripoli: Barbary Slavery and Imaginary Citizenship

This paper looks at a number of prominent children'd authors from the nineteenth century, including Samuel Goodrich and Thomas Mayne Reid, and explores how they adapt well-known Barbary captivity narratives for younger audiences. Both were heavily influences by Captain James Riley's 1818 "Sufferings in Africa," his account of shipwreck and slavery in North Africa. Specifically, I argue that the descriptions of North and West African peoples in this narrative challenge the understanding of racial pedagogy in the period as simply concerned with the differences between monolithic whiteness and blackness.