Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity
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.
1145868718
Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity
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.
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Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity

Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity

by Abdulhamit Arvas
Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity

Boys Abducted: The Homoerotics of Empire and Race in Early Modernity

by Abdulhamit Arvas

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478060635
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 03/14/2025
Series: Theory Q
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 344
File size: 46 MB
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About the Author

Abdulhamit Arvas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and coeditor of Critical Confessions Now.

Table of Contents

A Note on Transcription and Translations  vii
Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
Part I. Boys Encountered
1. Traveling Boys in the Mediterranean  45
2. Mapping Boys on the Horizon  81
3. (In)visible Boys in English Abductions  109
Part II. Boys Transformed
4. Refashioning Boys  141
5. Regendering Boys  169
Part III. Boys in Modernity, East and West
6. Staging Boys, 1690–1990  199
7. The Orientalization of Boy Love: A Conclusion  221
Notes  233
Bibliography  277
Index  309
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