Intimate Alterities: Mediterranean Microhistories of Enslavement and Redemption (1600-1800)

Intimate Alterities examines visual practices emerging from quotidian encounters between Christians and Muslims in the port cities of the Central Mediterranean during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Rather than focusing on the spectacular representation of enslaved bodies in Baroque art, the dissertation attends to small, often intimate objects to examine how images structured daily encounters between enslaved and free individuals, and how people in captivity used and manipulated images as strategies of emotional survival and as a means of sustaining connections to home. Three bodies of understudied visual material structure the dissertation: drawings of everyday life aboard a galley; graffiti scratched by enslaved Muslims into prison walls; and a miraculous sculpture whose cult was embedded in the circuits of Mediterranean captivity and redemption. Each constitutes a distinct form of testimony, one that does not simply supplement archival documentation but preserves dimensions of experience — fear, desire, solidarity — that records of captivity rarely capture. Combining close visual analysis with archival research, Intimate Alterities attends to marginal images to reveal how objects shaped religious and ethnic identities, mediated encounters across confessional lines, and exposed moments when categories of religious difference themselves came under strain.