The absent pirate: exceeding justice in the Indian Ocean

Legal, literary and visual archives are replete with absent pirates. It is remarkable how often the pirate is only partly delineated or seen from a distance, is ghostly, or plotted off-stage. These figurations variously nerve and unnerve imperial discourses and narratives of justice. This paper addresses some recent, fictional non-representations of 'the Somali pirate'. I propose that this absenting of the pirate is critical to the texts' various approaches or reproaches to justice. I further suggest that these fictions are concerned with an ethics of proximity - of physical space and geographical affect - that exceeds the primacy and virtue of 'justice'.