“I come as his right hand”: Imagining pirate disability, prosthesis, and interdependence in Black Sails

Abstract

Ostensibly a prequel to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 novel Treasure Island, Starz TV series Black Sails (2014-17) imagines a fleeting moment of possibility for anti-slavery and queer revolution in the Golden Age of Piracy. In the final episode, this possibility is extinguished by Long John Silver betraying the pirate and Maroon alliance, and Atlantic history veers back to its grim course of imperial conquest. Srividhya Swaminathan argues that Black Sails offers a “pastiche of a period in history that still inflects contemporary understanding of empire”. Black Sails’ pastiche reimagines pirates as a unique historical community in terms that also speak critically to contemporary neoliberal discourses of disability, which designate irreparably disabled people as a parasitic, dependent class distinct from the supposed norm of productive, independent adults. In the same year Black Sails appeared, David T. Mitchell explained that “devalued populations” are consigned to “zones of expendability”, marked out “for death (letting die) on behalf of sustaining other, more valued populations in lives of surfeit comfort”. By contrast, Black Sails’ creative engagement with histories of Golden-Age piracy suggests a radically different model: a crew that shares labour and profit as a composite body of cooperative “hands”, refusing to separate maimed from whole, transforms the meaning of dependency and disability itself.