While interned and awaiting deportation on Ellis Island in 1952, C. L. R. James turned to writing Mariners, Renegades & Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In, an analysis (primarily) of Moby-Dick, a novel from which he would draw out a hermeneutic capable of both reading his own interstitial statelessness and simultaneously serving as his juridical appeal to remain in the United States. In James's rendering, within the global heterotopia that is the Pequod, the ship's crew, those eponymous mariners, renegades, and castaways, serve as an international revolutionary grouping (an Anacharsis Clootz deputation of sorts), held together through their shared laboring and their tentative, precarious hold on any particular national belonging. In Sharada Balachandran Orihuela's monograph, Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves: Piracy and Personhood in American Literature, the fugitives, smugglers, and thieves of her title seem to paratactically conjoin with the mariners, renegades, and castaways of James's, a continuation and expansion of the kinds of question regarding citizenship and the state, nationalist inclusion and racialized exclusion, and formal and informal economies that James's monograph sought to probe in nineteenth-century American literature more than six decades ago. Orihuela, too, turns her attention to the transnational hydrarchy of the maritime world; however, the hermeneutic developed herein derives not from the shipboard labor of sanctioned accumulation but rather from the criminalized hinterlands of the piratic.

Orihuela turns to the pirate as a central organizing focus, a conceptual apparatus under which the diverse cast of characters she examines share a common ground (an ownership always already inimical to the American state). The pirate, perpetually codified as hostis humani generis (the enemy of mankind), an outsider threatening a regime of property ownership intimately tied to the benefactions of racial citizenship and national participation, “assaults the legitimacy, integrity, and power of the state by making possession possible for those persons deliberately dispossessed by the state,” and thus “forcibly expands the categories of personhood and citizenship in the American political imaginary” (2). In taking that which the state has denied, the piratic act models a radical redress, a claim to be recognized through property. If the pirate as such marks an excess, a marginalized and dispossessed populous that endangers the all too tenuous relationship between property and citizenry, then Orihuela's analytic mode itself adopts something like a piratic epistemology, assembling an expansive, diverse archive which attends to the multitudinous forms of this antagonistic relationship with the American state's property order. While Orihuela begins this episodic monograph with readings of the more traditional nautical pirate (a figure both crucial to the lore of an American independence and a harbinger of post-Revolutionary instability in propertied realms), she moves on to examine counterfeiters, fugitive slaves, hidalgos in the US–Mexico borderlands, and Confederate blockade runners as representatives of “pirates unsettling the state through their exceptional acts of propertied villainy” (19). Orihuela crucially carves out a space within these chapters to interrogate how gendered and racialized persons participate in the piratic as the sole avenue through which to stake a claim not only for inclusion but also for the material means through which to reproduce their lives – piracy as a necessary precursor to participatory agency, a catalyst to disruption.

Fugitives, Smugglers, and Thieves posits piratic possession as a combat to dispossession, but in so doing leaves in its wake a theorization of possessive individualism relatively intact, property's commodity form functioning largely to foster an entryway to participation within an ever-expanding and shifting capitalist world system. In its insightful attention to the piratic as an exposition of the vacuities and aporias of statist logics and the transnationalism evinced by those the state deems outside its protections, this text misses an opportunity to render the social nexuses developed and inhabited by the dispossessed, the shared articulations of a world that they themselves make, one that is otherwise, the manifestations of what Robin Kelley has called “freedom dreams.” James's mariners, renegades, and castaways hang together on the through-line of their jointly held labor and its corollary exploitation, a global revolutionary proletariat that seeks to undermine nationalism altogether. Orihuela has provided in this work an absolutely necessary reconceptualization of piracy, broadening its contours to shape an altogether novel constituency while simultaneously demonstrating the ongoing relevancy of its exceptionality as a cornerstone to the state's maintenance and expansion of power. Now, we must begin to look to these fugitives, smugglers, and thieves to identify something else they have collectively built, namely a living, laboring, and knowing in common, one appositional to that of mariners, renegades, and castaways.