Floating Prisons

This post from Subtopia is the sort of thing that puts blog-diary-experiment-notes like mine to shame. Even as I feel I need to skip over the authors first paragraph of self-deprecations (sorry) I find this really really useful. Sure, I have a long interest in prisons, see here, but if you want to start to get to grips with this floating carcereal violence (in a way more urgent than Foucault 101) then you gotta read the Subtopia post in full - and by doing so you also get to see the pics. So here is a taster, then click the link.

"...There is of course a long lineage of slave ships that date back probably as far as the birth of ancient civilization, but in more recent histories the prison boat (something different, though a seemingly natural progression) really started to evolve during the colonial era; and, not to our surprise, they served as a solution to the overpopulated modern prison systems that were falling apart, (not that different from today’s prison crisis or the similarly bursting detention facilities that hold scores of intercepted migrants, refugees and other global transients.) With that, it is hardly shocking that the construct of a floating prison continues to develop today"

Read the rest here.
.

Posthegemony

Pirates are "in" - see Jon B-M's recent action in Canada. Why suddenly do so many of us catch the stench of privateering as it wafts from the harbour across the campuses... echoed in Mick Taussig's course last term at Columbia on pirates too, and more

Posthegemony: "piracy, nomadism, and the state
The complexity and confusion regarding piracy's political economy leads to, is amplified in, and exacerbates a similar set of confusions regarding piracy's relation to the state. Moreover, an added complication here concerns first, the range of piratical activities and the nomenclature used to describe them, and second the historical vicissitudes of piracy from at least the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, in other words precisely during the period of the European state's consolidation, and imperial expansion. Take the issue of nomenclature. Though sometimes all non-state maritime violence is considered under the label of piracy, the series of differing terms employed at other times indicates multiple attempts (often finally frustrated) to distinguish between different forms of violence, or more strictly its different degrees of legitimacy. Pirate, buccaneer, privateer, private man-of-war, corsair, filibuster, freebooter, coastal raider. . . all these terms indicate subtle differentiations, of which by far the most important is that between privateer and pirate."
.

The Pirate Party

Check this out :

The Pirate Party "Because kidnapping and killing people on the high seas is exactly the same as sharing music with your friends!"

http://www.freeculture.org/pirates/

Music video contest!

For the Pirate Party, we want to show pirate-themed music videos while we dance. Thus, we are also holding a Pirate Video Remix Contest! The top three video remixes will each receive a snazzy FreeCulture.org t-shirt--a fine vestment for any pirate.

Rules:

The remixes/mash-ups should feature at least 10 seconds of recognizeable pirates (the traditional ARRR MATEY sea-going pirates). The entire video doesn't have to be pirates, but there should be a few clips to remind people that this is in fact a pirate party.
The music needs a beat that people can groove to. Extra points if the music is plunderphonics or otherwise exercises your fair use rights, but the primary requirement is that the music be danceable.
The music video should be placed somewhere online where we can download it, in a format that VLC can play. MP4 or MOV will work fine. Archive.org is an excellent place to host your video.
The deadline is April 21st, because the party itself is April 22nd and we need time to download the videos.


ta, bri
.

The Golden Hind

From our good friends at "Avast Ye Applications":

Seán Mac Mathúna writes: "There are four statues on the front of Deptford's old town hall in NewCross Road. Three of them are connected with slavery in the West Indies: Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake and Oliver Cromwell. In 1652, Cromwell had been a regular visitor to Deptford to oversee the building of two ships The James and The Diamond - built solely it seems, for expeditions to the Caribbean aimed at displacing Spanish power in the region. Maurice Thomson, a resident of the Manor House at Lee ... was said to have been a personal friend of Cromwell's and involved in these expeditions. They were part of a network of businessmen interested in the vast wealth that could be derived from the sugar/slave trade."

http://www.fantompowa.net/Flame/blackheath_slavery.htm

and from the endearingly entitled 'Enchanted learning' site...:

"Sir Francis Drake (1545-1596) was a British explorer, slave-trader,privateer (a pirate working for a government) in the service ofEngland, mayor of Plymouth, England, and naval officer (he was anAdmiral)."

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/explorers/page/d/drake.shtml
.