Pirate Assemblage

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This is a strong essay that intervenes in scholarly debates about pirate literature (and its relationship to more canonical texts) with original, smart, well-supported readings of books such as the General History. Your argument is grounded in deep knowledge of your primary texts and the scholarship of pirate literature, and you skillfully apply Deleuze and Guattari's theory of the assemblage to pirate literature. At first I was a little doubtful about how significant the difference between transgression and deterritorialization really is, but by the end of the essay you've made a solid case for taking the distinction seriously. I have no trouble imagining scholars of pirate literature paying close attention to your claims and responding to them in future articles and books.

I would like to put in a word for people who are not scholars of pirate literature, since I am not one myself, and your current approach--especially in your introduction and conclusion--limits your article's potential reach to this relatively small audience. Perhaps you didn't want to "dumb down" your essay with references to popular contemporary misrepresentations of pirates, especially in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. However, I think it would make sense to start and/or end with a discussion of something like how pop culture pirate narratives in the twenty-first century warp people's understanding of history and help perpetuate capitalism/colonialism by obscuring the intimate relationships between "legitimate" governments and corporate entitites (such as Disney) on one hand and criminal enterprises on the other when they represent piracy as little more than transgressive multicultural fun. This kind of approach would not only appeal to readers outside the fold of pirate literary studies, but would help establish the essay’s significance as a work of new economic criticism. (Even if you don’t want to bring in twenty-first-century pirate narratives, it would be a good idea to talk in the beginning and/or end about textual and historical echoes and continuities, about how we’re inhabiting narratives and economic realities that are rooted to some degree in early pirate texts and histories.)    

Whatever you decide to do with your conclusion, I could use more of a “what it all adds up to” series of claims at the end about why pirate literature matters. At various points, especially the end, I was expecting some more engagement with anti-capitalist and anti-colonial theory—some thoughts, for example, on how pirate literature shows us how opportunism and shifting alliances on every side can complicate simple notions of class conflict, resistance, and transgression. How are we ever going to have a post-capitalist, post-national world if the most “transgressive” people in Western societies, historically, have been dependent on these societies (and vice versa) and have often found it convenient to prop up empire and predatory capitalism? Maybe a more equitable future is impossible, and the authors of pirate literature sensed in the early years of empire and capitalism that these systems were dooming humanity to nothing but endless cycles of mutual predation, temporary cooperation, further exploitation, and so on. Or maybe pirate literature maps out a usable “line of flight” for people who are trying to figure out what post-capitalism and post-nationalism look like. I think the essay would benefit from a more explicit discussion of lines of flight in pirate texts. For instance, maybe you could comment on how the authors of early pirate literature seemed to have a more sophisticated understanding of the racial and cultural complexities of the colonial world than many people in the U.S. have of our society today, despite how much more interconnected our world is than theirs was.

I have a few additional comments, including suggestions for improvement:

·      It would be helpful if you could add a discussion early in the essay—if only in a footnote—of what you mean by territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization. I’m an ecocritic, so I kept waiting for an extended observation on how pirates’ irregular oceanic peregrinations relate to imperialist/capitalist/settler-colonial ways of thinking of, and living with, actual physical territories.

·      In general, your writing displays excellent unity and coherence. In the top paragraph on page 7, though, the transition from your discussion of women’s relationships with piracy to your discussion of other aspects of the “alternative economic system” could be smoothed out a bit.

·      I know you’ve already condensed the story of the three spoons, but some additional cuts wouldn’t hurt. It’s easy to get a bit lost in the weeds in that paragraph, and several details in the story don’t seem to contribute much to your argument.

·      There are a few examples of ambiguous pronoun references (such as “her body” and “her ambiguous gender identity” in lines 208 and 209), weak verbs, misspellings, and other things that wouldn’t be hard to clean up. On the whole, your writing is clear and engaging, especially when you’re talking about the surprising reversals of fortune that pirate literature depends on.  

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

I loved the suggestions to bring in some popular culture from the 21st century for the reader from a different field than eighteenth century studies, and so I did add one sentence in the introductory paragraph about how the General History of Pyrates is a significant source of material for today's movies and television. But I did not include any more than that because the essay is already long and adding popular culture would make my essay unfocused.

As per your recommendation, I also reorganized my conclusion to make the upshot of the argument more clear. And I cleaned up some of the sentence structure and language in some paragraphs to make them more readable and correct mistakes. Thank you for your generous and meticulous reading.

Reviewer 2 Report

I think the idea of 'pirate assemblage' is an intriguing one and the essay takes exactly the right contemporary approach to the theme of piracy, seeing it as something dilation, rhizomatic, and branching outside national/disciplinary.genre boundaries. The literature review at the beginning is quite comprehensive, but I am not sure how much we gain  by moving from 'transgression and 'progression,' and, although going beyond authorial identity is perfectly productive in this context (and has routinely been done), I am not sure going beyond gender or national identity is something advisable here. The matrix of piracy certainly places  these identities under pressure and reveals them in a different light; but the author's evident wish to use the context of piracy as a means of transcending or evading gender or racial identities is misplaced. For instance, the sentence including line 212 is not only awkward but seems very angry at the very idea talking about gender identity with respect to piracy. I can certainly understand taking the discourse beyond cross-dressing, but cross-dressing is not the only mode of gender identity, and indeed the ideas of social connectivity and commerce the essay prefers to explore are still inflected by gender. Certainly the Beggar's Opera is not a gender neutral text. Nor, even though capitalism affected people of any gender, does it make gender supernumerary or inapplicable. When the author says pirate ltierautr his multivalent, I am not sure whether it is proven that pirate literature is more multivalent than any other literature. Indeed, most deconstructive approaches recognize the potential for multivalence isn nearly all literary expression. 

Similarly, when the essay argues for taking the area of piracy beyond the Caribbean, one would say that New York, North Carolina, England, and West Africa may not be part of the Caribbean, but they are certainly part of the Black Atlantic.  New York or North Carolina as contexts for eighteenth-century literature in English hardly serves to de-racialize them, as the author seems to wish. 

Also, I am not sure Gay has ever been considered 'major literature.' The Beggar's Opera is known and in the canon, but that is not the same as being considered a 'great book,' exemplary, or canonical.Indeed, in Deleuzean terms it is most likely a bit of minor literature which has made its way into the canon more than most did, but clearly is operating in a different way than canonical eighteenth-century English fiction and poetry. 

When it comes to the final point about Swift, I become somewhat confused. I understand, and agree with, the authors endorsement of Weheliye over Hawes in stating that a merely satirical anti-imperialism is not really the same as a systemic indictment of imperialism. But the contrast of major./minor literatures seems odd (and the author should remember that though major/minor in the Deleuzian sense has some overlap with canonical/noncanonical, they are not the same; D and G's original example, Kafla, has always bene canonical). Critics such as Hester Blum, who would not want to seem opposed to gender, racial, or diaspora understandings of literature, are misleadingly used, as if an oceanic rubric nullifies or transcends oppressed or marginalized identities. 

I am surprised Jeremy Wear's work on piracy, which has considerable theoretical implications for the entire field, is not cited.

Deleuze is misspelled in the abstract, should be corrected. Guattari's should be spelled that way on page 4, line 116, Anne Bonney is spelled Bonny at one point, should be corrected; or if the author wishes to stick with the orthography Bonny seen in some sources, this should be made consistent or otherwise noted. The word 'notorious' in line 121 is tendentious; they may have bene notorious to the 18th century reading public, although even that  is not proven, but the wording implies they should be notorious in our eyes. 'The West Africa' in line 487 should be corrected to west Africa.  Line 488, Édouard Glissant should have an acute accent over the capital E. 

To be a productive essay, the author will have to abandon the intent of refuting racial or gender identity in criticism and concentrate on how the pirate assemblage makes an innovative formal argument that can complement rather than confound anti-racist and anti-patriarchal work in transnational Anglophone eighteenth century studies.

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reader,

Thank you for your careful reading of my essay. I was concerned that my essay gave the impression of being "angry" about scholarship on gender identities. It was not at all my intention to argue against the feminist analysis of these texts, since in fact I see the debates among feminist critics as one of the starting points for my own analysis. And so, I have rewritten that paragraph and others passages in my essay to emphasize my debt to that prior criticism and what I hope to contribute to the ongoing debate. What I find interesting is that there are divergent and opposing points of view amongst the various scholars on how to read that book, and that debate is what motivates my own effort to contribute with the "assemblage" concept. 

Reviewer 3 Report

The overall thesis of the paper, the notion of "assemblage," is a strong one, especially in relation to General History. In addition to the multiplicity of genres the author mentions, there is also the strong possibility of multiple hands in the text itself, especially in the various revisions to Volume I. Indeed, some note might be made that the text is transformed many times between 1724 and 1728, and even thereafter, when it is often joined with stories of highwaymen and other land-robbers. I wonder if there is a way for the author, without going too deeply down this very deep rabbit hole, to make some note of the textual instability of GH in its earliest versions.

A couple of significant points of contention: I notice that the scholarship is now getting a little dated--the most recent citation is from 2014, while some significant scholarship has appeared since then, specifically, Frohock's article "Satire and Civil Governance in GH" in 2015, and Mark Hanna's "Well-Behaved Pirates Seldom Make History" and his major study Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, which deconstructs Rediker and Linebaugh to a considerable degree. There has been a lot of work on pirates in the last decade, and I'd like to see this article reflect some of that.

The "truth" of the Reed and Bonny stories in GH is quite questionable. Much of the salacious "is-he-a-she?" stuff that occupies so much space in the narratives is well undermined by the testimony in The Tryals of John Rackam (1721), where one witness quite freely states that both Reed and Bonny appeared in either men's or women's clothes, as they saw fit, but that even in men's attire their femaleness never seems to be in question. In fact, it's not really much of an issue. Much of what appears in GH, then, can be regarded as fiction, which explains much of the narrative shape of the stories of both women. I'd like to see this section reconsidered

One other minor detail--complete Articles for George Lowther and John Phillips appear (307-308 and 342-343 in Schonhorn's ed.)--both seem derived from Roberts' Articles, but Roberts' are not the only articles included.

 

Author Response

Dear Reader,

I am grateful for the suggestions of further scholarship to read, and I spent the last month reading them. Several of the suggestions, as well as some others from the editor, are now incorporated productively and (I hope) seamlessly into my argument.

I also appreciated the point about the fictionality of the stories about Bonney and Read. I had thought my essay was clear that I was not talking about the real women, but about the way the General History embellishes their story, so I revised that paragraph to make that more clear and correct the mistakes that this reader noticed. 

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The essay has been revised according to my request and is now ready for publication.