| Popis: |
This chapter focuses on the figure of the neoliberal dictator in Francisco Goldman’s The Ordinary Seaman, arguing that the white captain and first mate are capitalist dictators who use a marooned ship in an abandoned Brooklyn pier as their technology of domination. The novel depicts the shipowners as modern-day explorers, slave owners, and filibusterers who employ a group of Central Americans but never pay them and keep them trapped on the ship in fear of deportation. The shipwreck functions as a metaphor for the crew’s situation as well as a narrative device, and the novel’s discourse is structured through breakage and stranded temporality. The chapter ends by considering the multiple significations of scraps and holes in the novel, demonstrating how the ruinous holes of the shipwreck are repurposed and repaired in the novel through the narrative form as the crew piece together scraps of their narrative testimonies for a migrant community that offers them safe harbor. |
