The video below demonstrates the ways in which a finite number of rhetorical commonplaces (morality, romance, law, marginality, history, trade, nation, and violence) were configured during five eras of the pirate tradition (the Golden Age of Piracy, the period between the Golden Age and the Civil War, the Civil War era, the 20th century, and today). The straight lines represent links made between commonplaces; the dashed lines represent distancing mechanisms, that is, when the commonsensical link between two commonplaces was severed. For instance, in the first slide, the commonplaces of "marginal" and "nation" are both linked and distanced. This is because some key texts from that period articulate a link between pirates' marginal identity and a given nation, while others carve out space for pirates within the national discourse. The linking mechanism occurs in a 1699 letter, published as a broadsheet, and calling upon Parliament to stamp out piracy in the Americas by "bring[ing] all these Colonies to a more immediate dependence on the Crown." Distancing can be seen in the preface to the second edition (1684) of Buccaneers of America, which talks about "the unparallel'd, in not inimitable, adventures and Heroick exploits of our own Countrey-men ... whose undaunted and exemplary Courage, when called upon by our King and Country, we ought to emulate."
(For some reason, creating an animated version of the rhetorical topographies we drew up last week seemed like a good project to start around 11:30 last night ... When I finished in the wee hours of the morning, I couldn't figured out a better way to turn a PowerPoint presentation into a video than the following, though clearly it has some problems. We are, of course, working on a formal analytical write-up of this complex process during the daylight hours.)
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You are still in DC right? Go visit the new media center thing in Hurst, I bet they have some useful toys you could use.
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