Transatlantic Piracy

Pirates as revolutionary adventurers and violent outlaws have populated transatlantic literature and popular culture for centuries. Romantic clichés, however, tend to hide the pirate figures ideological complexity at focus in this study. The book shows how literary and cultural representations of piracy frequently debated contradictory ideas of national, ethnic, cultural, and gender identity. It takes off at the heyday of piracy in the late 17th century, when political and social upheavals characterized the relations between different European powers and their North American colonies. At this time, pirates were out of reach of national legislations, which predestined him as a much-heralded figure that articulatesat times affirming, at other times criticizingprevalent discourses of law and legitimacy, of conquest and violence, of freedom and slavery. Gansers study is the first to ask how Anglophone narratives of piracy discuss such issues. Circling around various scenarios of socio-political and cultural crisis, from the colonial era to the revolutionary war against Great Britain and the US declaration of independence to the ongoing crisis over slavery that culminated in the Civil War, it addresses how the pirate served as an ideological figure that meant different things at different times. Finally, the book also looks into the present, showing how contemporary crisis scenarios regarding intellectual property, environmental demise, and representative democracy again call up the figure of the pirate in the media. The books method of contrapuntal analysis, outlined by Edward Said, performs a reading against the grain that looks at hidden voices and marginal figures in the context of dominant ideologies. This approach also shows the many voices inhabiting a literary text and the task of the critic to hear them. In this light, the pirate appears as a prototypical capitalist and colonizer on the one hand and as a fighter for alternative ways of life, including radical democratic ideas of equality and liberal values, on the other. Ganser demonstrates the importance of these texts for the development of a national and cultural identity in the emergence of a concept of America / the United States. Reading different archival material together, from travel books to sermons, from historical novels to visual culture, this analysis enables a new understanding of the ambivalent figure of the pirate.