Gathering Piracy II

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

In our current information age, as in the Early Modern period, new technology has changed ideas of space and made the individual both more connected and more vulnerable. Perhaps as a consequence, scholars in recent years have increasingly turned their attention to maritime predation, an activity that it highlights the hazy interstices of political and cultural systems. This two-part series of panels responds to the LASA 2015 conference theme “Precariedades, exclusiones, emergencias” by considering new approaches to the study of piracy, both as literary motif and historical phenomenon, with respect to Latin America and the Spanish Pacific. The eight papers featured here consider a broad geographical spectrum and a chronology that spans from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. The first panel (program track: Literary Studies -- Colonial and 19th Century) examines questions of representation and rhetoric involving piracy, and the second (program track: History and Historiography) proposes new ways to view piracy as a driver of key historical processes in the region.

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Session Organizer

• Mariana Velazquez, Columbia University

Chair

• Mariana Velazquez, Columbia University

Individual Presentations

• Drake, Rogers y Anson en el Mar del Sur: bandidos o héroes - Sabrina Guerra, Universidad San Francisco de Quito

• Anti-Spanish privateers of the “masterless Caribbean” (1813-1815) - Edgardo Pérez Morales, New York University

• “A Small Floating Republic”: The Privateer Bouchard and his ship La Argentina - Jimena N Rodríguez, UCLA