Piracy, Globalization and Marginal Identities

251 Pages·2009·2 MB·English

Piracy, Globalization and Marginal Identities: Navigating Gender and Nationality in
Contemporary Hispanic Fiction

by
Alana B. Reid

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(Romance Language and Literature Spanish)
in The University of Michigan
2009

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, Chair
Associate Professor Jarrod L. Hayes
Associate Professor Cristina Moreiras-Menor
Assistant Professor Lawrence M. La Fountain-Stokes
© Alana B. Reid
2009
For Lisa
ii
Acknowledgements

My sincerest thanks to Lola, Phil and Cathy for everything they did to get me here. Also
thanks to my many mentors, especially Michelle Joffroy, for pushing me to go deeper and
farther, Silvia Bermúdez for believing in my potential, and Alex Herrero for his many
insights and continuous enthusiasm for my research project.
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Table of Contents

Dedication. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ii
Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . iii
List of Figures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v
Abstract. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vi
Chapter 1
A Theoretical, Historical and Literary Introduction to Piracy in the Hispanic
World . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Chapter 2
Gender Piracy across the Ages: The Shifting Representations of Anne Bonny and
Mary Read in Literature, Art and Film. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
Chapter 3
Lobas de mar: A Cuban Exile’s Take on the Female Pirates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112
Chapter 4
Gender Piracy and Colonial Mexico: The Female Pirate in Carmen Boullosa’s
Duerme . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .146
Chapter 5
Subjectivity and the Politics of Embodiment in Son vacas, somos puercos . . . . . . 182
Conclusions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 228
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .233
Filmography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .242
iv
List of Figures

Figure 1.1
Tibia and silk stocking from Whydah shipwreck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4
Figure 2.1
Cover of the Dutch translation of Johnson (1725) featuring a monstrous
Anne Bonny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Figure 2.2
A lighthearted version of Anne Bonny from the 1725 Dutch edition of
Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .74
Figure 2.3
Anne Bonney and Mary Read etching by B. Cole from Johnson’s first edition . . . . 75
Figure 2.4
Lithograph by Alexandre Debelle of Mary Read bearing her breast after winning a
duel from P. Christian’s Histoire des pirates et corsaires (1946) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Figure 2.5
Nationalizing the pirate: Postage stamps of Anne Bonny and Mary Read
from several Caribbean countries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80
Figure 2.6
The female pirates in the dream sequence of Captain Kidd’s Kids (1919) . . . . . . . . 81
Figure 2.7
The sooty Countess Francisca after her duel with Anne Bonny in The
Spanish Main . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Figure 2.8
“So you’re his idea of a mate for life?” Captain Anne Providence sizes up
the honest Molly in Anne of the Indies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .97
Figure 2.9
Captain in a dress: Anne (of the Indies) takes an awkward stab at femininity
as she orders Pierre to “Bear a hand with these lines astern!”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101
Figure 2.10
“She couldn’t hit the side of a ship with an axe.” Bonny of The Buccaneer
frequently appears as a wild woman prone to violent tantrums . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .104
Figure 2.11
“This is all the country I want.” Bonny at The Buccaneer’s finale . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107
Figure 2.12
The Spanish Main’s Anne Bonny with a severed sword. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109

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ABSTRACT:
Piracy, Globalization and Marginal Identities: Navigating Gender and Nationality in
Contemporary Hispanic Fiction

by
Alana B. Reid
Chair: Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola

This study examines the pirate as a subject of critical inquiry from the perspective of
Spain and Latin America, beginning with a history of Early Modern piracy and an
overview of the vast corpus of Hispanic pirate literature from the fifteenth century
onward. My analysis centers on literary texts published between 1992 and 2003, which
are evaluated in the context of the historical narratives, images (such as lithographs) and
Hollywood films that inspired them. I argue that the recent boom in pirate literature from
Latin American writers is due to the effects of globalization, which has put local
identities into question and heralded a new admiration for piracy as a form of resistance
to cultural and economic domination. I expose the multiple forms of piracy that manifest
themselves in these recent works, which layer contemporary identity politics onto Early
Modern subjects. Identity theft, intellectual property theft, and copyright infringement
are proposed as contemporary analogues to Early Modern piracy, as is the notion of
“gender piracy”—a term I use to refer to the conscious appropriation of gender by the
female pirates, Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and their fictional counterparts in
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Hollywood film and Hispanic literature by Jorge Luis Borges, Laura Antillano, Carmen
Boullosa, Zoé Valdés and Alberto Vázquez-Figueroa. The multiple crossings that occur
in pirate literature—which transcend linguistic, cultural, national, and gender
boundaries—are understood with the aid of transgender and transatlantic theories by
Judith Butler, Marjorie Garber, Judith Halberstam and Paul Gilroy, among others.
Additionally, my reading of Zoé Valdés’s Lobas de mar is aided by the contributions of
global theorists, such as Arjun Appadurai. I analyze Carmen Boullosa’s Duerme with the
assistance of Chicana feminisms in order to discuss the main character’s articulation with
la Malinche, Sor Juana and Catalina de Erauso—transgressive women of Mexico’s
colonial history. Psychoanalytic feminism (Kaja Silverman, Cathy Caruth, and Laura
Mulvey) is essential to my reading of male subjectivity in Carmen Boullosa’s Son vacas,
somos puercos. Finally, my discussion of Mexican and Cuban nationalisms is enriched
by the contributions of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Benedict Anderson, and Walter
Benjamin.

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Chapter 1

A Theoretical, Historical and Literary
Introduction to Piracy in the Hispanic World

The Pirate as Theoretical Subject

…the pirate inhabits and crosses the
permeable membrane that divides enemy
from foe, civilization from its other.
-Jon Beasley Murray

The pirate is a highly paradoxical figure who lies at a crossroads: neither neatly
severed from the state apparatus, nor entirely operating from within its structures.
Characterized as both outcasts and heroes, alternately hyper-masculine or effeminate,
they seem to be whatever we want them to be, whatever is convenient or in vogue at the
moment. In the sixteenth to eighteenth century Caribbean, pirates were shielded from
punishment by their ambiguous political status which led officials to turn a blind eye to
their illegal, non-state sanctioned activities, which “brought revenue to the sovereign,
public officials, and private investors […] weakened enemies by attacking their shipping
and settlements […] supplied European markets with scarce goods at affordable prices
[and] broke competing states’strade monopolies” (Thomson 107-8). In fact, French and
British corsairs not only escaped punishment, but were rewarded with titles of nobility.
1
When their illegal practices became a menace to local officials in the early eighteenth
century, however, “piracy was transformed from an ‘honorable crime’ to a crime against
the human race” (Thomson 108).
While piracy has historically taken many different forms, pirates are generally
admired today, especially by young people, for their anarchist ethos—their disregard for
laws, social hierarchies and private property. They are emblems of the weak acting out
against the injustices and abuses of the rich and powerful—the marginal subject sticking
it to the central authorities. Paradoxically however, pirates have been mainstreamed in
the past century, appropriated, commercialized and sold to the masses through film,
popular literature, and a never-ending series of exhibits from Disneyland to science
museums whose gift stores are filled with a cornucopia of pirate kitsch, in addition to
informational resources. Pirate themes and paraphernalia, in fact, are a staple of port
cities in coastal communities in and outside of the United States, including the shores of
the Great Lakes. No matter how tacky or commercial, these homages to pirates are often
historically grounded—that is to say that pirates did indeed frequent the area at one time,
though the specificity of this history may be watered down or completely obliterated in
the exhibit. At other times, the pirate themes are exploited in order to draw an audience,
as I will discuss below.
The discovery of pirate treasure by Barry Clifford off the coast of Cape Cod in
1984 yielded him much more than its weight in gold. The historical value of the artifacts
had layered value, not just upon the Spanish coins, but also upon the musket balls,
clothing and bones of the now long deceased pirates. Clifford’s discovery earned him
fame not only because he became an instant billionaire, but also because the artifacts
2