The Concept Of Race And Equality In Royall Tyler's The Algeria Captive; Or, The Life And Adventures Of Doctor Updike Underhill Six Years A Prisoner Among The Algerians (1797)

Résumé: This Research intends to trace back the algerian- american relations during the eighteenth century. Throughout that time, western captives were held in Algiers and wrote about it in different accounts. Among captivity narratives that describe the situation of captives in the Muslim world during the eighteenth century, the work of Royall Tyler, The algerine Captive, is considered to be a real depiction of the situation of captives in Algiers considering the narrator Updike Underhill experience. This novel challenges the existent stereotypes about muslims and algerines and shows a different dimension from where the realities of captive treatment in the muslim world can be seen. This research clarifies the existence of captives rather than slaves in islam and investigates whether equality exists in a time of tension and hostility between Christians and Muslims. It also examines the role of captivity narratives in America. To illustrate these ideas a news historicist approach was used to recover the lost histories, also a cross cultural approach to compare between the Algerine and the American societies, and finally a post colonial theory to deconstruct the previous binaries about the Algerines and the muslims. The findings from the research confirm that Westerners created the myth of piracy and referred to the Algerines as pirates to justify their attacks on the Algerine shores. Also, the results show the existence of equality among the different races in Islam that values humans' rights, as it was witnessed by captives who lived among muslims. We conclude that most of those who wrote about Algiers have stereotypical ideas, such as Cervantes, so the real account of captive treatment in Algiers is that of Tyler, in which he deconstructs the binaries and challenges the early stereotypes.

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