Boys Abducted
The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity
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In Boys Abducted, Abdulhamit Arvas explores the history of abducted boys in English and Ottoman literary and visual culture to examine the relationships between homoeroticism, race, and empire in the early modern period. The popular literary trope of the abducted beautiful boy--often eroticized as an exotic object of desire--intersects with the historical phenomenon of vulnerable youths who were captured and exchanged within the global traffic in bodies. Arvas offers a queer-historicist analysis of a wide array of Ottoman and English texts and genres ranging from poetry, drama, and travelogue to chronicles, maps, and visual arts. He shows how the boy in these representations crosses boundaries between nations and empires, embodying the tensions and dissonances between the aestheticized eroticism of literary and cultural representations and the violent history of abductions, conversions, and enslavements. In so doing, Arvas presents complex parallels and connections between the two societies, highlighting the circulation of sexual and racial discourses in imperial imaginings to uncover discursive formations and formulations of sexuality, race, and empire.
About this Author
Abdulhamit Arvas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and coeditor of Critical Confessions Now.
Reviews
"In this unique and much-needed book, Abdulhamit Arvas analyzes the complex nexus of race, religion, gender, homoeroticism, empire, and social hierarchy brought into play by the widespread early modern practice of abducting boys. This is not an encyclopedic compendium of beautiful abducted boys for the prurient pleasure of the collector, but rather a mapping of the material relations of power behind this practice. No other work addresses the homoerotic traffic in boys so eruditely from both sides of the Ottoman/English divide, illuminating a great many crossings and borrowings between the two empires."
"A work of great archival research and comparatist ambition, Boys Abducted contributes crucially to the transcultural analysis of early modern violence, eroticism, and affect. By unfolding the literature and history of the Ottoman abduction and conversion of white European boys and young men, and by similarly tracing the representations of Ottoman and Black boys in England, Abdulhamit Arvas powerfully demonstrates the importance of reading these literary histories together and shows their astonishing crossings and mutual inflections. For scholars of premodern sexuality and early modern English literature including especially Shakespeare and Marlowe, the wealth of Arvas's intersectional analyses will be a revelation."
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