Originating in ancient treatises and laws concerning piracy, the designation of hostis humani generis, or “enemy of the human species,” has long served to mark a legal state of exception and to legitimize violence as a defensive act against an aggressor on behalf of a threatened community. Today, as Daniel Heller-Roazen has shown in his The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (2009), this tradition still lives on in the concept of crimes against humanity or in the US War on Terror. Sonja Schillings's new book Enemies of All Humankind makes use of this “legal fiction” to study literary negotiations of legitimate violence in the transatlantic world. Less interested in the legal trajectory of the concept, Schillings reinterprets hostis humani generis (abbreviated in the following as HHG) as a specific discursive and textual constellation that has proven extremely flexible over time to accommodate very different agents and forms of violence. Setting out to examine the “defining properties of these basic relations” in “texts across time and disciplines,” Schillings considers HHG “the most basic version of a culturally overarching concept of legitimate violence” (8).

Rereading the tradition's thinkers like Augustine of Hippo, Hugo Grotius, or William Blackstone, one of Schillings's central claims is that the conventional understanding of HHG as a binary confrontation between civilization and aggressor should be replaced by a tripartite constellation that splits the latter into two separate entities: the praedo, an evil, traditionally racially Other, representative of an enemy culture; and the pirata, a boundary-transgressing renegade figure striving for personal gain in an in-between zone of conflict. This split becomes instrumental for Schillings's readings of American novels because it is here, and particularly in the wake of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, that the pirata is reinterpreted as a foundational national figure whose violence sets off a transformation of space and is eventually translated into institutional change by representatives of civilization. Echoing Richard Slotkin's metaphor of “regeneration through violence,”Footnote ¹ Schillings understands the HHG “frontier-model” constellation to inform “a perpetual process of civilizing disruption within national space” (18), in which an ever-changing cast of praedones, piratae and representatives of civilization renegotiate the legitimacy of private and institutional force. The use of the constellation outside its original context of piracy therefore represents, the author maintains, “an American invention” (13).

In her readings of US novels, this reinterpretation of HHG allows Schillings to detect the pirata figure in villainous settlers (James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer (1841)); an impoverished black youth committing rape and murder (Richard Wright's Native Son (1940)); a power-brokering industrialist (Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929)); a Nazi propagandist and American spy (Vonnegut's Mother Night (1961)); and a Princeton-educated Pakistani immigrant, financial analyst and potential terrorist (Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)). Reflective of changing models of civilization and these writers’ different politics, the praedo appears as either bloodthirsty Indian tribes, white racial oppressors, committers of crimes against humanity, or (Islamist or US) representatives of totalitarianism. While the HHG concept arose in response to the murky jurisdiction of the open seas, this kind of conflictual in-between zone becomes the model, Schillings argues, for how writers represent the American wilderness, the crime-ridden urban jungle, or the twenty-first-century planetary space of cosmopolitan values and international terrorism.

Acknowledging the concept's historical baggage of dehumanizing Others and legitimizing imperialism as well as other forms of state-sanctioned violence, Schillings aims at a decentering of the hostis humani generis constellation that allows for enough “categorical flexibility” (238) to account for changing conceptions of legitimate violence. The historical and geographical reach of her study is as impressive as her readings of theory and nonfictional and fictional texts are original. At the same time, the degree to which Schillings needs to modify the original concept for her discursive genealogy raises the question of how useful the concept is after all. As Schillings sometimes provides little specific textual evidence for the legal fiction's relevance in these texts, a skeptical reader might just as well interpret the novels’ character constellations as dramatizations of, for example, the sometimes violent demands of competing ideologies and value systems. At times, Schillings's use of the concept becomes as ambiguous as the fictional pirata protagonists, as the following passage on Vonnegut's Mother Night illustrates:

This is certainly true. But one could also arrive at this conclusion without having to perform complex modifications of a highly problematic legal concept. At the end of a thought-provoking study, the question remains whether the designation of “enemy of the human species,” whose ostracism will haunt even the most progressive reification of the legal concept, is appropriate or even desirable to retain for the critique of structures of racial oppression or other “acts of institutional force”; whether it can be truly constructive in the “actualization of the civilized essence of national institutions” (240); or whether it is not itself morally illegitimate and obfuscates our understanding of the multiple forms, intimate intensities, and harrowing effects of individual, political, or state-sanctioned violence.