Piracy, globalization and marginal identities: Navigating gender and nationality in contemporary Hispanic fiction.

摘要

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 Hollywood film and Hispanic literature by Jorge Luis Borges, Laura Antillano, Carmen Boullosa, Zoe Valdes and Alberto Vazquez-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 Zoe Valdes'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 Felix Guattari, Benedict Anderson, and Walter Benjamin.