Negotiating Crisis and Legitimacy: Atlantic American Narratives of Piracy, 1678-1865

This project traces the construction of the pirate in transatlantic American literature and culture from the late 17th century to the Civil War, exploring in what ways the cultural imaginary teased out the pirates ambivalent potential as a figure of identification and Othering, and how it has been used to articulate and negotiate ideas of (il)legitimacy. Narratives about pirates were significant for the formation and development of a number of popular genres in Anglophone print culture: of published trial reports, execution sermons, and broadsides, in which condemned pirates justified their actions in the late 17th and early 18th centuries; of popular histories and historical romances in the 19th century, which romanticized the pirate as a revolutionary outlaw; of captivity narratives during the so-called U.S. Barbary Wars against North African city-states (1801-05, 1815), in which former American captives who had been caught by Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean and sold into slavery compared them favorably to triangular slave traders; or of caricatures of Southern pirates at the beginning of the Civil War, which were printed upon Union envelopes to deplore slavery and the act of secession. Authors like Cotton Mather, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville were similarly drawn to the pirates ambivalent appeal for the rhetorical and literary negotiation of contemporaneous questions of legitimacy: with regard to Puritan authority, the American Revolution, or the institution of slavery. Historically, pirates were marked by their shifting national, racial, and at times even gender affiliations; because of this semantic elusiveness, s/he also became a literary trope which allowed for a symbolic negotiation of various identity constructions (such as British colony versus independent Republic; or United versus divided, slave-free or slaveholding States during the War of Secession) that had come into crisis in the (post-)colonial history of the United States and the Anglophone Caribbean. The project enquires into ways in which narratives of piracy articulate discursive positions regarding questions of (il)legitimacy and probe such oppositional ideas of identity, e.g. by creating ambivalent pirates between folk-hero and blood-thirsty criminal, or by using piracys de-stabilizing potential regarding constructions of racial, ethnic, and gender difference. It recasts piracy as a discursive category moving in a continuum between the propagation of (post-)colonial adventure and accumulation on the one hand and critical commentary on exploitation and colonial oppression on the other. Reading narratives of piracy as symptomatic of various crisis scenarios, the project examines how the pirate was imbued with (de)legitimatory meaning during such periods and how popular cultural texts interpellated a non-elite readership to reflect on pressing issues of legitimacyand thus on the future of American national identity.

This project examined representations of piracy in transatlantic American literature and culture from the late 17th century to the Civil War, exploring in what ways the cultural imaginary teased out the pirates ambivalent potential as a figure of identification and Othering, and how it has been used to articulate and negotiate ideas of (il)legitimacy. It explored narratives about pirates in terms of their significance for the formation and development of a number of popular genres in Anglophone print culture: of published trial reports, execution sermons, and broadsides, in which condemned pirates justified their actions in the late 17th and early 18th centuries; of popular histories and historical romances in the 19th century, which romanticized the pirate as a revolutionary outlaw; of captivity narratives during the so-called U.S. Barbary Wars against North African city-states (1801- 05, 1815), in which former American captives who had been caught by Muslim pirates in the Mediterranean and sold into slavery compared them favorably to triangular slave traders; or of caricatures of Southern pirates at the beginning of the Civil War, which were printed upon Union envelopes to deplore slavery and the act of secession. The project explored both little-known (e.g. M. Maxwell Philip, M. M. Ballou) and canonical authors in American and transatlantic literature (such as Cotton Mather, James Fenimore Cooper, and Herman Melville) who were drawn to the pirates ambivalent appeal for the rhetorical and literary negotiation of contemporaneous questions of legitimacy: with regard to Puritan authority, the American Revolution, or the institution of slavery. It has shown how historically, pirates were marked by their shifting national, racial, and at times even gender affiliations. Because of this semantic elusiveness, piracy, it has been shown in various publications, also became a literary trope which allowed for a symbolic negotiation of various identity constructions (such as British colony versus independent Republic; or United versus divided, slave-free or slaveholding States during the War of Secession) that had come into crisis in the (post-)colonial history of the United States and the Anglophone Caribbean. The project recast piracy as a discursive category in a continuum between the propagation of (post-)colonial adventure and accumulation on the one hand and critical commentary on exploitation and colonial oppression on the other. Reading narratives of piracy as symptomatic of various crisis scenarios, it examined how the pirate was imbued with (de)legitimatory meaning during such periods and how popular cultural texts interpellated a non-elite readership to reflect on pressing issues of legitimacy. Archival research also brought to light the popularity of 18th- and 19th-century pirates on the theatrical stage, most often in the form of melodrama and nautical spectacle. As these have never been discussed by literary scholars before, the project has thus lead to a new corpus that awaits further scholarly exploration in the future. In addition, the project contributed to explore the impact of the `oceanic turn` in the humanities on American Studies and the study of American literature.