Criminality and legitimization in seawaters: a study on the pirates of Malabar during the age of european commercial expansion (1500-1800)

The maritime piracy included a wide variety of associated criminal activities including attack and confiscation of vessels and merchandise, imprisonment or torturing of merchants and rulers in sea-space in return for ransom money, attack and raiding of coastal trading centers and villages, creation of fear and terror in chief channels of navigation and attacking commercial competitors as a strategy to weaken the trading ability and the wealth-mobilizing ability of their rivals. All this applied to coastal south west India during the period under study. The merchant chiefs of Cannanore like Mamale Marakkar and later under Poca Amame (Pokar Ahamad) and Pocarallee (Pokar Ali) were some of the better known protagonists that the Portuguese had to deal with. But the Malabar corsairs had their corresponding English and Sicilian corsairs in the Mediterranean.

The dark side of the Mediterranean : expression of fear from the inquisition to the present

Inside the stones of its most famous buildings, Évora keeps mysteries and secrets which constitute the most hidden side of its cultural identity. A World Heritage site, this town seems to preserve, in its medieval walls, a precious knowledge of the most universal and ancient human emotion: fear. Trying to transcend many of its past and future fears, some of its historical monuments in Gothic style were erected against the fear of death, the most terrible of all fears, which the famous inscription, in the Bones Chapel of the Church of São Francisco, insistently reminds us, through the most disturbing words: “Nós ossos que aqui estamos pelos vossos esperamos”. If the first inquisitors worked in central Europe (Germany, northern Italy, eastern France), later the centres of the Inquisition were established in the Mediterranean regions, especially southern France, Italy, Portugal, and Spain. Consequently, the roots of fear in Évora are common to other towns, where the Inquisition developed a culture of fear, through which we can penetrate into the dark side of the Mediterranean, where people were subjected to the same terrifying methods of persecution and torture. This common geographical and historical context was not ignored by one of the most famous masters of American gothic fiction, Edgar Allan Poe. Through the pages of The Pit and the Pendulum, readers get precise images of the fearful instruments of terror that were able to produce the legend that has made the first grand inquisitor, Tomas de Torquemada, a symbol of ultimate cruelty, bigotry, intolerance, and religious fanaticism, which unfortunately are still the source of our present fears in a time when religious beliefs can be used again as a motif of war and destruction. As Krishnamurti once suggested, only a fundamental realization of the root of all fear can free our minds.

El Mapa de la Vida e El Corrector: aproximações e distanciamentos das representações literárias madrilenas a Nova Iorque

El Mapa de la Vida (Adolfo García Ortega, 2009) e El Corrector (Ricardo Menéndez Salmón, 2009), são dois romances contemporâneos que polarizam a discursividade literária acerca da experiência dos atentados a 11 de Março de 2004, na capital espanhola. O artigo propõe-se a questionar as diferentes representações literárias da cidade de Madrid num contexto de ansiedades e inseguranças, potencializado por esse acontecimento, através de uma reflexão que identifique as proximidades e singularidades com representações de diferentes naturezas: Haverá um discurso de uma identidade própria e local, ou de uma identificação e apropriação global (nomeadamente em relação ao 11 de Setembro)? E as representações literárias dialogam com outros média narrativos (as artes visuais e performativas), ou, pelo contrário, as suas vozes e silêncios são específicos de uma expressão literária? Deste modo, pretende-se que seja estabelecida uma rede de relações entre diferentes discursos sobre a construção da cidade (Madrid em primeiro plano) enquanto espaço da experiência do terror.