The Day I Was Taken by Pirates and Made to Dance a Jig

Abstract

Employing sensory, visual, and poetic modes of inquiry, this piece explores relationships between pirate lore of Newfoundland, settler colonialism, and embodied experience. Situated in coastal communities known in history and folklore for harboring pirates, I use memory, fieldwork, and autoethnography to articulate fluid and unsettled aspects of the colonial project. Geographer and sociologist James Overton writing about the invention and commodification of Newfoundland culture two decades ago noted Memorial University of Newfoundland’s role in the region’s “cultural revival” while researchers engaged in community development initiatives. Such revived circuits of tangible or intangible heritage were often the product of (displaced or deterritorialized) intelligentsia. Portrayed as oppositional to dominant political forces, these contemporary pirates, plundered local culture through academic theories, and reconnected local identity with settler history and knowledge. The subsequent revived constructions of place in the work of tourist-oriented theater initiatives, literature, music, or restorations of the built environment reproduce the origins of settler culture for tourist consumption. While offering class-based critiques of the economic experience of settler life, they do not often interrogate the premises, mechanisms, and consequences of settler culture. The creative research underlying this poetic inquiry allows for critical associations to be made between settler tropes, their continued performance and re-performance, and the displacement and erasure of the region’s original peoples.