The Impropriety of Pirates

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson

doi:10.12957/matraga.2024.85316

Authors

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson University of California, Irvine https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6839-0242

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12957/matraga.2024.85316

Keywords:

Pirates, Machado de Assis, Borges, Moguillansky

Abstract

There are few pirates in the Latin American cultural tradition even though piracy was a fundamental force shaping the trajectory of the colonial and post-colonial Americas. This essay traces the seeming impropriety of piracy in relation to a genealogy in which pirates are themselves figure of the improper, conduits for improper wars and markers of struggles over the proper relationship to property. Readings of a few key texts – Machado de Assis’ “Canção de Piratas” (1894), J. L. Borges’ “La viuda Ching, pirata” (1935), Alejo Moguillansky’s film El escarabajo de oro (2014), and Nuruddin Farrah’s Crossbones (2011) – take the textualizations of piracy as reflections on the carrying capacity of form.

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Author Biography

Adriana Michele Campos Johnson, University of California, Irvine

É Professora Associada de Literatura Comparada na UC-Irvine. Ela é autora do livro Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (2010) e está concluindo um novo projeto sobre infraestruturas visuais na América Latina. Entre as publicações recentes estão “Um dia na vida: Copy, Enunciation, Chatter” (Listening to Others: Eduardo Coutinho’s Documentary Cinema), “An Expanse of Water” (Liquid Ecologies in the Arts), “In-São-Paulo-Visible” (Revista Hispanica Moderna), “Visuality as Infrastructure” (Social Text). Há anos ensina um seminário sobre piratas para alunos de pre-grado.

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