For your research paper, you will select one of the following travel/captivity narratives, read it, and analyze it. Write a paper that explores a question that arises from your reading of the text. 5-7 pages.
You might frame your questions along the following lines:
What was the motivation for writing this specific narrative, and how did that motivation shape the story?
How can we understand the experience of encountering and learning another culture through this narrative?
What does the narrative reveal about cultural ideas about race, gender, religion, etc.?
Can we trust the narrative? If so, how do we know? If not, what does it reveal in spite of its particular flawed lens?
And so on.
Your essay should offer an argument, and you are required to consult a minimum of two peer-reviewed secondary sources to provide context and background information.
Link to the sources that need to be used in this research paper are directly below:
Focusing on the nature of this practice only from the lenses of the form of enslavement introduced by European and American settlers goes not give a full account of slavery. Reading through the above-described text piqued my curiosity about what slavery looked like in traditional societies and how the practice was different from the commonly held perception of slavery. At face value and from the widely accepted conceptualization of slavery, both practices are similar, considering all of them involve deprivation of individual liberty and other rights. To some extent, what differs will be the extent of such deprivation. As such, looking at what slavery looked like in traditional societies might give people a chance to get a holistic view of the practice, and as such, abandon the narrow chattel slavery perception.
