This roundtable forms part of a joint research-teaching session on new methods and debates in the study of Atlantic and Caribbean piracy. At its core, this session ask us to articulate how we teach and reframe the transimperial and multilingual phenomenon of maritime predation. Piracy, like slavery and imperial expansion, looms large in coursework on colonial Latin America, the English colonies, and the Dutch and French Atlantic. The question is especially relevant in the classroom, where students often approach piracy through previous exposure to its many romanticized representations in film, television series, and videogames. In dissecting the practices of privateers and buccaneers, the engagement of broader publics – beyond the academic setting – carries immense import as well. Piracy, after all, casts a very long shadow in American culture since childhood. As Trouillot eloquently explained thirty years ago, historical production is not exclusive to academia and must therefore contend with a wide array of alternative narrators. Whose pirate accounts, then, do we teach and how?

This roundtable engages the question of narration because the archive of piracy itself is limited, yet may be amplified considerably when taking into account the experiences of ordinary people affected by maritime predation. Indeed, how do we think of other actors – captives, spouses, militiamen, children, inn owners, and clergy – affected by maritime predation? Pedagogically, how do we present their experiences, often penned in a variety of languages (French, Spanish, English, and Dutch) to students in the monolingual survey course or seminar? In a profession increasingly receptive to digital platforms, how do our students confront the relative absence of digital databases and source collections on piracy? Can the digital somehow help us understand and teach the ordinary, domestic, bureaucratic, and landed elements of maritime violence?

Our panelists will also address the ways in new research of the African diaspora and Native America has begun to reframe the conversation surrounding maritime predation, which, in turn, has also led to a re-examination of the categories under which it is studied. Recent scholarship on Transatlantic and Caribbean slaving increasingly intersects with the piratical practices of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Studies that center racialized slaving practices in Mexico, Jamaica, Curaçao, the Bahamas, Florida, and Saint-Domingue (to name a few) have complicated debates of whether pirates should be understood as slave traders, contraband merchants, commissioned privateers, or simply as the perpetual “enemigo.” Along the same lines, greater awareness of coerced participation in maritime crews has enabled new research currents on the pursuit or recovery of legal freedoms for people of African and Indigenous descent throughout the contested Atlantic. Our roundtable participants will contribute their teaching experiences with these questions and other queries brought forth by the audience.