(In)Visible Boys in English Abductions

Chapter 3 traces boys from foreign lands whom the English abducted and converted. These boys, often from Africa, India, and the Americas, were relegated to lifelong servitude, and as domestic servants, they were vulnerable to their masters’ sexual advances. Within this hierarchical paradigm, I analyze Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a Mediterranean play with a focus on the abduction of the Indian boy. Focusing on Oberon’s abduction of the boy in the Mediterranean zone around Athens, I scrutinize the homoerotic dynamics of territorial domination created via the racialized boy. I put the Indian boy into dialogue with black African boys of English portraiture in the following decades. The repertoire of exotic boys in visual imagery and in the streets of London shows that as England was establishing itself as an imperial state, abducted boys became a medium for colonial agents to display their imperial claims.