Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My paper considers the relation between narrative desire, statelessness, and the modes of spatial and temporal distance and anonymity at work within economic globalization in Francisco Goldman’s 1997 novel, The Ordinary Seaman.
The novel takes up the story of characters whose lives become connected to the Urus, a cargo ship registered under Panama and manned by Central American nationals. The ship’s phantom owners eventually abandon the failed enterprise as crew and ship lapse into statelessness at Brooklyn harbor.
Structured through a series of narrators whose ultimate commonality is the desire to find a refuge and a recuperated masculinity through labor, the novel explores the conditions for producing, consuming, exchanging, or otherwise using narratives within economies of romance and capital as the men labor toward impossible futures. The paper interrogates the differing subjectivities of global entrepreneur, storytelling observer, and masculine refugee-worker-slave as they become apparent through the novel’s exploration of desire and the use of narration—whether to produce profit, to guarantee love, or to possess as secrets that promise to reconstitute the self.
My readings focus upon three related modes of global capital that help generate the novel’s plot: the shipping system of flags of convenience (in which shipowners flag ships in countries with little or no connection to the owners, business, or crew, in order to escape labor and safety laws); the treacherous promise of the Panama canal (and the as yet unrealized Nicaraguan canal) for the Americas; and the sea as a wild zone of profit that renders legal identities—of refugee, slave, citizen, laborer, prisoner, capitalist—illegible, thus producing stateless bodies and phantom owners.
The paper considers how distance, both temporal and physical, becomes a problematic at work in globalist discourses as well as in the historical imagination of Central American and U.S. relations, from the dreams of Panamanian and Nicaraguan canals (dreams held by U.S. imperialists, Central American elite, and el libertador Simón Bolívar); through the wars of the 1980s in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala; and up to the contemporary moment of continued violence and Central American diaspora.
Haunted and belated forms of slavery occupy the Urus; this paper considers the mutation of the master-slave relation into an informal economy inseparable and hidden from the formal global economy. As a counter to the informal economy of contemporary slavery comes the language of love: Esteban, a former Sandinista soldier turned ordinary seaman, enacts a contemporary marronage from the ship into the neighboring Latino and African-American neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Esteban’s relationship with Joaquina, an undocumented worker from Mexico, comes to rewrite the transnational American romance.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This essay examines Emma Goldman's life in conjunction with her essays on marriage, love, sexuality, and the feminine.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Focusing on the work of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, this paper makes use of Michael Warner's analysis of publics and counterpublics to analyze the emergence and practices of anarchist publics. The multiplicities, temporalities, and struggles of Goldman's and Berkman's publics, plus relations of their publics to subcultures and their possibilities for world making, are examined.

Publication Type: Proceeding

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: At the start of WWI the US and its President Wilson was hesitant to get involved. Nevertheless once German submarines attacked several American merchant ships, sinking three, Wilson requested that Congress declare war on Germany. Both the House of representatives and the Senate approved a War resolution and the U.S declared war on Austria-Hungary in December 1917. Along with the declaration of war a compulsory conscription law was passed. Anarchists, including Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman played an active role in the anti-conscription campaign, supported at the same time by a large number of the US population who saw WWI as European affair. Goldman and Berkman used their publication Mother Earth, and numerous gatherings, to encourage those that were opposing their compulsory subscription to object to it. They were both arrested on June 15, 1917, and charged with conspiring against the draft, they were convicted and sentenced to two years in prison with the possibility of deportation at the end of their term. After an unsuccessful appeal to the Supreme Court, Goldman began serving her term at the Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City. On September 27, 1919, Emma was released. Goldman’s speech to the jury in the New York court, enables us to see a clear distinction between understandings of legal responsibility and political responsibility. What we may see is that legal responsibility is primarily measure or accounted for on the basis of shear observance of legality, leaving no space for deliberation, critique and dissent. On the contrary, as she demonstrates in her speech political responsibility can be found at the limits of precisely of legality. What the paper aims at deliberating upon is the possibilities that political responsibility can open up in creating new life associations by focusing primarily on two indexes that are central to Goldman’s speech: those of patriotism and political violence.