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

InBoys 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.USAbdulhamit 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.Abdulhamit Arvas is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and coeditor ofCritical Confessions Now.“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 bol32