Create successful ePaper yourself
Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.
ever interpreted their conversion to Islam as a kind of ultimate<br />
form of Ranterism, or even as a means of escape from<br />
(and revenge upon) a civilization of economic and sexual<br />
misery-from a smug Christianity based on slavery, repression,<br />
and elite privilege. Renegado apostasy as self-expression<br />
- mass apostasy as class expression - the Renegadoes as<br />
a kind of proto-proletarian "vanguard": such concepts as<br />
these have no existence outside this book, and even I hesitate<br />
to advance them as anything more than quaint hypotheses.<br />
The "vanguard" failed, the Renegadoes vanished, and their<br />
incipient culture of resistance evaporated with them. But<br />
their experience was not meaningless. nor do they deserve to<br />
be buried in oblivion. Someone should salute their insurrectionary<br />
fervor, and their "temporary autonomous zone" on<br />
the banks ofthe Bou Regreg river in Morocco. Let this book<br />
serve as their monument; and through it let the Renegadoes<br />
re-enter the uneasy dreams of civilization.<br />
AFTEl\ WOl\D TO THE SECOND EDITION<br />
x.<br />
THE Tl\OUBLESOME TUl\KE: A<br />
MOOI\ISH PIl\ATE IN OLD NEW YOl\K<br />
In Memory of Christopher Hill<br />
Some years ago I went to the Main Branch of the New<br />
York Public Library in search of some book that would tell<br />
me all about "pirate utopias", pirate settlements on land. I<br />
failed to discover any such book. So far as I know there was<br />
then no such book. It seemed that if I wanted to read it someone<br />
would first have to write it.<br />
As it happens, the NYPL owns a huge number of books<br />
on piracy, most ofthem (at that time) squirrelled away in the<br />
11th Avenue Annex. I did a bit ofidle reading there, and put<br />
together a lecture on the subject for the Anarchist Forum<br />
(Libertarian Book Club) at the old Workmen's Circle in<br />
New York. The lecture was well received, but no one in the<br />
audience took up my chaUenge to write a book on pirate<br />
utopias. Years went by, I got tired ofwaiting, and decided to<br />
write it myself.<br />
So I did. In 1995 Autonomedia published it.40<br />
40. In the end I despaired ofa complete treatment ofthe subject and<br />
decided to concentrate on one example-the Bou Regreg<br />
Republic-simply because no historian had ever thought of it as a<br />
205
Change language