This talk examines the unlawful propertied exchanges in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789) and Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859) through the lens of piracy. By repositioning illegal acts of property ownership to include fugitivity at the center of enslaved subjects’ demand for personhood, Vassa and the fictional Blake use the logic of attaching personhood to property to counter the state’s exclusion of slaves and freedmen from recognition. Moreover, these pirates’ demands for recognition threaten to destabilize the very foundations of the state, rather than merely reinforce the importance of its extant iteration.

Sharada Balachandran Orihuela is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and affiliate faculty in the Department of American Studies, the U.S. Latina/o Studies Program, the Asian American Studies Program, and the Latin American Studies Center at the University of Maryland, College Park.