Liberty and death: Pirates and zombies in Atlantic modernity

Questioning the opposition of freedom and enslavement and of life and death, zombies and pirates have negotiated (post)colonial relations for centuries. Zombies, bodies or spirits doomed to serve a master beyond death, thematize histories of enslavement which also include rebellion. Similarly, pirates were used to articulate colonial adventure and exploitation on the one hand and the idea of a resistant collective beyond established power relations on the other. Both have been cast as figures of exception who are discursively located beyond law and state while simultaneously playing a constitutive role for both; both figures are marked by ambivalent characterizations – hero and criminal, rebel and slave, perpetrator and victim. This opening essay introduces the conjunctures of these figures in the Atlantic realm with a focus on their cultural-historical functions for empire and nation building, for legal discourses and the history of ideas, as well as for contemporary cultural and artistic research.