Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in American Literature by Sharada Balachandran Orihuela (review)

Sharada Balachandran Orihuela offers a fascinating study of the pirate as a figure who "unmakes the unjust and dispossessive state" through acts of theft that stage a material and ideological resistance against its exclusionary politics (2). Orihuela looks to Locke's Second Treatise and Black-stone's Commentaries to establish the centrality of property ownership to the creation of the liberal subject and civil society, rendering property "the source as well as the guarantor of rights" (9). Thus, property is embedded within a "matrix of rights and claims for citizenship," access to which was routinely and systematically denied to racial minorities and the poor (11). Within this context, resistance to the state's "propertied regime" constitutes simultaneously a rejection of its exclusionary politics and a positive assertion of rights to property and citizenship on the part of the dispossessed (11). For Orihuela, piracy's resistance to the state and its distribution of property and citizenship rights renders the pirate an archetypal "property outlaw" (12). The genius of Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves lies in Orihuela's use of the pirate as a property outlaw to make legible numerous other forms of property outlawry as metaphorical acts of piracy, including counterfeiting, fugitivity, squatting, and blockade-running. These outlaws "create new networks and communities of ownership that exist outside the official channels sanctioned by the state," thereby challenging the "naturalized relationship among the state, citizenship, and property" (12, 13). This expansive definition of piracy allows Orihuela to tell a much broader story about piracy's literary history than is often told. This story unfolds in two parts. Part 1 comprises two chapters and examines antebellum narratives of nautical piracy and counterfeiting. Part 2 comprises three chapters and examines the literatures of slavery, squatting, and smuggling from the antebellum period through the close of the nineteenth century. The study closes with an afterward on piracy, terrorism, and narcotrafficking.

Chapter 1's analysis of the sea fiction of James Fenimore Cooper, William Gilmore Simms, and Eligio Ancona is exemplary for its comparative approach. Orihuela begins this chapter with Ancona's El filibustero (1864), which is set in colonial Mexico and which narrates Capitán Barbilla's journey from dispossessed orphan to dispossessing pirate. Barbilla is forced to embrace piracy as a means of securing a name for himself in the absence of lineage and patrimony and in the context of a Spanish colonial economy that has long marginalized his home in the Yucatán. His use of the wealth amassed by piracy to found a "new, egalitarian community in the Yucatán" demonstrates "the failure of colonial Spanish legal institutions to protect the interests and the well-being of the population" (29). Ancona's indictment of the "Spanish monopolistic and dispossessive state" recasts Barbilla's piracies as a necessary response to state restrictions on colonial trade and recasts the Spanish colonial economy itself as piratical in its dispossession of Yucatec rights to economic and social integration (30). In this way, El filibustero illustrates piracy's response to exclusionary propertied regimes.

Orihuela uses Ancona's narrative to recontextualize Cooper's and Simms's works as parts of a hemispheric debate about property, person-hood, and citizenship in the nineteenth century. Cooper's The Red Rover (1829) and The Water-Witch (1830) take on new significance as Anglophone meditations on the very economic displacements that concern Ancona. In The Water-Witch, Dutch merchant Alderman van Beverout refuses to condemn piracy and contraband trading on the grounds that shadow economies are the only means of resisting monopolistic colonial trade policies (32). Likewise, Master Seadrift, who serves as the pirate Tom Tiller's second-in-command, critiques corrupt monopolistic colonial economies for inhibiting individual enterprise and suggests that colonial governments are piratical in their appropriation of lands and resources (32–33). Concerns about the economic and political marginalization of colonial subjects surface in The Red Rover as well through the...