The absent pirate: exceeding justice in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

Legal, literary and visual archives are replete with absent pirates. It is remarkable how often the pirate is only partly delineated or seen from a distance, is ghostly, or plotted off-stage. These figurations variously nerve and unnerve imperial discourses and narratives of justice. This paper addresses some recent, fictional non-representations of 'the Somali pirate'. I propose that this absenting of the pirate is critical to the texts' various approaches or reproaches to justice. I further suggest that these fictions are concerned with an ethics of proximity - of physical space and geographical affect - that exceeds the primacy and virtue of 'justice'.