Unsettling Subjects

Though the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) ostensibly extended American citizenship to the Mexican landed class at the conclusion of the Mexican American War and ensured their property rights despite the transfer of land to the U.S., they were nonetheless stripped of formal claims to their property and forced to enter into lengthy and costly legal battles to regain possession of these ranches. Hidalgos had to compete with Anglo agricultural settlers (or squatters), as well as with the railroad barons looking to expand railways in the newly annexed territories. Women are able to best navigate the unstable political economy of the borderlands through the act of squatting, understood broadly to mean the settlement of “unoccupied” land. Read alongside the significant historical events including various land laws and pre-emption acts of the mid-nineteenth century, hidalgo women perform forms of ownership that upend the racialized and gendered logics of citizenship, and the intimate ties between property and rights. The Squatter and the Don recasts the “problem” of Mexican land occupation as U.S. anxiety over territorial expansion and colonization made more complex by the presence of differently racialized populations along the borderlands.

America’s Blackbeard

This chapter examines the ways early nineteenth century authors framed piracy as an instrument of state growth, anti-colonial resistance, as well as a rationale for imperial expansion and intervention in the Americas in William Gilmore Simms’s The Yemassee (1835), John Brougham’s 1857 play Columbus, El Filibustero!, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Red Rover: A Tale (1829) and The Water Witch; or, The Skimmer of the Seas (1830), as well as El Filibustero: Novela Historica (1864), written by Yucatec author Eligio Ancona. In a climate of rapid national expansion, nineteenth century authors used the pirate as a central character to plot national(ist) narratives. Given piracy’s relationship to both state-building and anti-colonial enterprises, as well as piracy’s capacity to both facilitate and threaten property ownership, piracy helps us understand the radical and repressive regimes of American power. The historical novels examined in this chapter are interested in the shadowy origins of the American nation-state, as much as they are with the potentially conflicted present and future of these nation-states.

Counterfeit States

This chapter looks to overlapping discussions of American economic health and growth to present a complex story about the circulation of currency as well as the circulation of late-eighteenth century conceptions of American personhood in the works of Charles Brockden Brown and Stephen Burroughs. These imaginative accounts of counterfeiting dramatize the intimate bonds of normative conceptions of citizenship and national currency. This chapter shows how discourses of counterfeiting distinctly frame the social and political geographies of the early American republic. Moreover, the lack of uniform paper currency in the early Republic (which produces social, political, and economic instability) mimics the lack of a uniform understanding of national citizenship in this same period to such a degree that some late eighteenth century authors respond to this dual precarity by proposing that counterfeiting a uniquely American form of self-making, both because the counterfeiting enterprise gives rise to new, albeit economically unstable, homo economici, and because these new economic bodies are themselves forging and/or imitating the dress, behaviors, and codes of propriety in order to capitalize on counterfeit currency. Thus, counterfeiting alleviates some of the anxiety about the lack of uniform national citizenship.

Queen Cotton

This chapter studies the language of President Lincoln’s naval blockade of Southern ports on April 19, 1861, which frames the South as a “rebellious state” and severely limits the lawful commercial activities that are allowed to take place in Southern coastal waters. This event catalyzes a long series of debates around diplomatic recognition, as well as revitalizes debates about property, sovereignty, and piracy. These debates taking place on an international stage, however, are expressions of anxieties regarding property and recognition (read: the recognition of the individual body as citizen) taking place in the South. This chapter reads Eliza McHatton Ripley’s From Flag to Flag: A Woman’s Adventures and Experiences in the South During the War, in Mexico, and in Cuba (1889) and Loreta Janeta Velazquez’s The Woman in Battle: A Narrative of the Exploits, Adventures, and Travels of Madame Loreta Janeta Velazquez (1876) alongside contemporaneous memoires that describe commercial during the blockade, to illustrate the pervasive anxieties regarding recognition and commercial life at this historical moment. In this case, the Confederacy’s lack of access to property, its isolation from international markets, and its deprivation of diplomatic recognition, is a reflection of the experiences of dispossession and lack of recognition endured at a personal scale by Southerners at this time period.

Introduction

The introduction tackles the place of piracy in the creation of the U.S. nation-state and more expansive conceptions of citizenship. Piracy is not simply an act of robbery against an individual man or institution, but rather a behavior that contests the very legitimacy and integrity of the state. And yet, as historical and cultural studies of piracy show, piracy is also a behavior that is capable of creating novel forms of community. It is a behavior that those with little to no claims to protections from the state turn to in order to ensure economic and social survival through property ownership. After all, property has always been integral in the creation of citizenship and has played a pivotal role in the development of normative conceptions of U.S. citizenship and national belonging that reverberate across the Americas. By making property accessible to those individuals altogether excluded from the category of the citizen, dispossessed persons’ expressions of property ownership structurally upset and ultimately unsettle the state’s dispensation of property and citizenship. In sum, dispossessed persons’ ownership of property is always a form of piracy in that it troubles the legitimacy, integrity, and power of the dispossessive nation-state.

Afterword

The conclusion considers the importance of acts of piracy, terrorism, and narcotrafficking in helping to consolidate and expand the reach of U.S. state power in a post 9/11 world. The U.S. state has grown and been strengthened by framing certain behaviors as requiring extralegal measures to suppress acts of “inexplicable villainy.” Indeed, perhaps this is why piracy continues to matter. Debates around the existence of Guantanamo Bay and drone strikes point to the capaciousness of the language of terrorism, which has been borrowed from the language of piracy in legitimizing extrajudicial expressions of state power. Indeed, the existence of extrajudicial spaces and expressions of state power, which run counter to the protections guaranteed by the state, have made apparent the need to sustain and perpetuate the language of piracy. It would seem that piracy’s significance has not diminished in the years since the Civil War’s conclusion.

The Black Market

This chapter considers varied forms of political life made possible through the framework of theft. Recognizing that the hemispheric slave trade is a piratical act in the context of the novel, these pages argue that Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass suggest that slaves too should engage in piratical economic behaviors as a response to the illegal commercial activities undergirding the peculiar institution. By exploring the economic impact of enslaved subjects as thieves, Black participation in the market emerges as a strategy that disrupts the proper operations of exchange and doubly creates a “b/Black” market. Illegal trade, in the hands of an enslaved population, is a way for enslaved bodies to stake claims to personhood and, ultimately, freedom. Read alongside the significant historical events of the mid-nineteenth century, Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) and Martin Delany’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859-1862) frame an interest in the intersections of economic freedom and liberal principles as they come to bear on the enslaved Black subject in the nineteenth century.