Remember: rapine first, then murder.

[melannen]

A poll, on something I have been curious about for years, but particularly relating to the current discussions about race in the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie.

Poll Disclaimer: OMG, not enough poll options! As a liberally-educated white chick, I feel the need to add: These are categories that I felt might be relevant to Captain Sparrow, not

Comments

[beccaelizabeth]

I voted "Even his Sainted Mum could only give Best Odds", but on reflection have to admit that mostly I clicked that because it made me laugh. What I actually thought about the character was that he didn't make me think about race at all. So probably vaguely white.

Jack looked like to me like being outside in the sun a lot. It just didn't make me think ethnic groups.

[melannen]

Well, it's not entirely about looks; it's about culture just as much. Which the "Sainted Mum" option touches on too - not knowing says a quite a lot about her class, her career and even where she was living. But yay for you if you can watch without thinking in those terms at all! I wish I could.

You know how to go back and change your vote if you want, right?

[tarimanveri]

Ooh, ooh! *bouncesbouncesbounces* On the

reimagining of the pirate culture as a truly transcultural space, where everybody comes from somewhere else, and it's fascinating and colorful but never matters more than who the people *are*. White or black or any other color, Governor's daughter to former slave, Anglican cleric or Aztec curse - it's all very much there, all different, all equally valued, and more important than any of that - is that, at heart, they're PIRATES! Historically accurate? Umm, no.

front, can I point to (and recommend) Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker's The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, particularly Chapter 5: "Hydrarchy: Sailors, Pirates, and the Maritime State"? And also Marcus Rediker's Between the devil and the deep blue sea : merchant seamen, pirates, and the Anglo-American maritime world, 1700-1750? Because Linebaugh and Rediker very carefully make the argument that pirates in the early eighteenth century "limited the authority of

[melannen]

Nononono! See, I'm trying to *resist* what happened after I saw the first pirate movie and went off to read every single pirate book I could get my hands on

[gaspaheangea]

you don't have "Johnny Depp being vague and mysterious" or "Empress Caraboo" as options.

[melannen]

I did have "deliberately ambiguous"! Which is currently winning! But the poll is supposed to be about Jack, not Johnny.

Princess Caraboo! I'd never heard of her before, but that is so right. (My personal backstory is that he is the son of the vicious pirate Captain Swan and the king's daughter of Mindanao. And that was even before Captain Swann showed up in a Dr. Who story.)

[siegeofangels]

I see Jack Sparrow as white, probably because I know that the actor is white.

Re: cannibals: I thought vaguely about finding it offensive, but then I thought, well, we're not really trying to break new ground here: this is Stereotypical Pirate Story, Uber-Pirate-Story, and as such of COURSE there are cannibals.

This is about as close to canon as Velveeta, but based on the kids' book tie-in PotC: Jack Sparrow: The Coming Storm, I can put Jack's birthdate right around 1700 or so. If that helps.

[melannen]

Of course, by 18th century Spanish reckoning, he had a Castiza mother and a Criollo father, which made him white but *just barely*. But yes, I wonder it that's part of it - I had never seen Johnny Depp in anything *before* PotC, and when I saw him play the gringo of gringos in Mexico afterward, I was utterly amazed.

I was about where you were with the cannibals, I think, except I found myself rather liking some of what they did with them to bring them up to standard. And then I found some posts that were highly offended by them, and I thought too much.

RE: the kid's book: that's horrifying. You actually read one? Are they better than they sound? I doubt they could be worse.

[siegeofangels]

The book was . . . amusing. I got a lot of giggles out of it, only some of which were me thinking, "This is just like fanfic, only without the sodomy!"

Teenaged Jack Sparrow seems to be written not so much as an extrapolation of what Jack would have been like as a teenager to end up as the adult Jack Sparrow we know and love, but rather as Jack Sparrow who happens to be a teenager. It's a little odd. But still funny.

[frey_at_last]

In completely unrelated news, I've decided that Captain Sparrow's spiritual father among the Orishas is the Black Rabbit of Inlé.

Definitely!

[melannen]

Yay! Is that because you know about the Santería orisha Inlé, or is it just because Magical Warrior Rabbits! Because either way is awesome.