Titled “Culture, Crime, and Commercialization: Fluid Identities in the Atlantic Arena,” these papers challenge conventionalized and pop culture interpretations of pirates, island life, and Indie culture. These lifestyles and trends have become highly commercialized within recent years, and so reconstructed identity through film, literary, and artistic representations. Our panel proposes to critically examine such modern reconstructions in a transnational light, and so deconstruct the popular, misinformed façade to reevaluate the reality, value, and popularity of these images and identities in contemporary times. Our panel is thematically unified through an exploration of the truth behind the representation, and by the search for identity, whether cultural, criminal, or re-conceptualized for commercialization.

Furthermore, our panel immerses interested scholars in the emergent field of Transnational Studies, and so directly engages the Red River Conference’s primary focus. We view the United States and, indeed, the entire Atlantic region, as fluid; as a transnational locale that straddles, creates, and crosses cultural, economic, and constructed borders. Within such a region, hybrid cultural forms defy the “purity” of identity, and call any popular culture representation of identity into question. Our panel uniformly addresses these issues.


Kathleen M. Grode (South Dakota State University): Indian-Atlantic Currents: Examining the Undertow  

“If everyone is a rebel, against whom will we rebel, I wondered. If we become mainstream, what will we do with the power and influence we could exert over the rest of the world?”

~ Sarita Sarvate, Indian columnist

The United States has long called herself a “melting pot” of peoples, cultures, and customs and extended an open hand to “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” And yet, overcoming and accepting differences necessarily requires acknowledging difference, just as rendering one (or more) aspects of a culture or people a threat requires acknowledging the threatening or subversive element within that culture. In contemporary times, the West both calls for unity – to view all peoples as a unified “imagined community”, as Benedict Anderson writes – and ostracizes the cultural aspects of a society that do not fit into the accepted box of each nation’s imagined community.

In this paper, I shall examine the aspects of Indian culture that the United States and the united Kingdom have recently adopted and that mainstream popular culture has embraced – fashion, music, yoga, and meditation. By analyzing representations of Indian culture in popular films such as Monsoon Wedding, Bend It Like Beckham, and Children of Men, I shall hypothesize where the West has drawn a line of demarcation between itself and the East – between what the West deems acceptable, commercialized, pop culture Indian-ness and forbidden, threatening, un-Western Indian-ness.

Through Melani McAlister’s review of Orientalism (Epic Encounters) and Anderson’s theories of imagined community (Imagined Communities), as well as works from various Indian writers (such as Sarvate), musicians, and designers, I shall examine how transatlantic popular culture creates and shares acceptable notions of “Indian-ness” through “India chic” fashion and the adoption of Indian meditational forms, yet embodies its concerns with the popularity of Indian exports within film and music, so developing and offering the West an “authentic”, non-threatening version of Eastern culture.



Bridget Nordquist (South Dakota State University): “A Pirate’s Life for Me”: Pirate Societies as Liberal Transnational Communities

In the last several years, few trends have exploded into a worldwide phenomenon like the fascination with historic pirates. Thanks to recent popular representations such as Disney’s multi-million dollar Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the very idea of pirates has never been so glamorous. Given such representations, most people now accept as fact that pirates were generally a motley assortment of well-intentioned treasure hunters who lived the good life except when various extraneous forces conspired against them. This assumption, of course, is a gross oversimplification and exaggeration. However, notably, the fact remains that such generalizations regarding pirates are indeed partially rooted in fact. During the so-called “Golden Age of Piracy,” a period that Frank Sherry explains in Raiders and Rebels roughly spans the 17th and 18th centuries, pirate ships and communities took on unique characteristics that resulted in the enactment of radical ideals (7). Pirate societies functioned as transatlantic communities that were unique from other existing societies at the time as they were often loosely democratic, egalitarian, and rejected national loyalties.

This paper will explore the exceptional circumstances that allowed pirates to form such societies and how these societies manifested themselves in the Atlantic region. I argue that pirate’s formed liberal transnational communities in response to oppressive contemporary societies that surrounded them in the form of nation-states that allowed for little social advancement, few independent opportunities, and doled out harsh punishments for not silently accepting one’s given status in the social hierarchy. Consequently, pirate ships and communities often emerged as zones where all races and social backgrounds were accepted and power was subject to egalitarian rule. Such an investigation will call on not only insightful secondary sources such as Marcus Rediker’s Villains of All Nations, but also on authentic first-hand narratives of pirates and those who came into contact with them, including Charles Ellms’ The Pirates Own Book and Aaron Smith’s The Atrocities of the Pirates. These documents and accounts exemplify revolutionary transnational practices as they were actually enacted and reacted to in the Golden Age of Piracy.

Works Cited

Ellms, Charles, ed. The Pirates Own Book: Authentic Narratives of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers. Dover, 1993.

Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon, 2004.

Sherry, Frank. Raiders and Rebels: The Golden Age of Piracy. New York: Hearst Marine, 1986.

Smith, Aaron. The Atrocities of the Pirates. Lyons, 1999.


Colleen Poindexter (South Dakota State University): The Black Diaspora: Jamaica Kincaid’s search for Identity

Many critics have approached the novels of Jamaica Kincaid as “coming of age” literary works. While her literature certainly fits within this genre, this paper will initiate a reappraisal of conventional interpretations of Jamaica Kincaid’s texts, propelling them into more than auto-biographical works or social commentaries on “island life.” Rather than focusing solely on the most immediate surroundings of Kincaid’s work, this essay will resituate these novels within the more extensive cultural geography which Paul Gilroy has termed the Black Atlantic. My interest lies in the search for identity which emerges as a predominant concern among the writings of many black Caribbean authors. As new fields of interdisciplinary studies continue to develop, critics are forced to re-evaluate literature using these new theories.

Jamaica Kincaid’s novels Annie John (1983) and A Small Place (1988) investigate issues of colonization and slavery and how these shape a black Caribbean’s sense of identity. Through the utilization of Stuart Hall’s writings on Cultural Identity and Diaspora, along with Paul Gilroy’s writings on The Black Atlantic, this paper will identify the transnational influences which act upon identity in the Caribbean. Hall’s essay discusses the two positions of “cultural identity” and the three dominant presences of Africaine, Europeene, and Americaine which influence black Caribbean’s identity. These influences are visible throughout Kincaid’s works and allow readers an alternate understanding of her literature. Gilroy’s essay questions cultural nationalism and how it leads to “an absolute break in the histories and experiences of ‘black’ and ‘white’ people.” Gilroy posits the “black Atlantic” in order to introduce a transnational space which acts upon many black individuals. Hall and Gilroy’s essays shed new light on Kincaid’s literature and her never-ending search for a cultural identity.

Works Cited

Braziel, Jana Evans, and Anita Mannur, ed. Theorizing Diaspora. Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Gilroy, Paul. “The Black Atlantic as a Counterculture of Modernity.” Braziel 49-80.

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Braziel 233-246.

Kincaid, Jamaica. Annie John. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983.

---. A Small Place. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988.