LEVIATHAN

Lovers of Entertainment featuring Various Insurrections of the Abyss Told as Hydrographic Adventure Narratives

Friday, June 29, 2007

What are the 9 races of the world, according to Pirates 3?

For those who haven't seen the movie, the principals (Sparrow, Turner, and Swan) wind up at a meeting of the "nine pirate lords", and it's immediately clear (to me, anyway!) that they represent Disney/Verbinski/someone's exhaustive scheme of racial categorization.

W.E.B. DuBois claimed there were eight races: Slavs, Teutons, English, "the Romance race," Semites, Hindus, Mongolians, and Negroes. Pirates paints a somewhat different picture, with its "nine lords." At first glance I took them to be: Chinese (Swan, in place of Sao Feng), African (Jocard), French (Chevalle), generic Latin American (Vallenueva), Spanish (Barbosa), Caucasian (Sparrow), Indian (Sumbhajee), generic Middle Eastern (Ammand), and Chinese Race II (Ching). (An unexplored possibility: either Swan or Ching represents the race of Women ...)

But the Wikipedia entry about these matters tells a slightly different story, or perhaps just a more specific one. (It appears to be partly crib notes to Disney's website, and partly made up by the author.) Ammand is said to be Turkish, Barbosa hails from the Caspian Sea, and Vallenueva is Spanish. Also Keith Richards is from Masagascar.

(It's also interesting to sort the pirates in terms of the ethnic/national identities and ancestries of the actors who portray them: Ammand is Syrian, Ching is American with Japanese parents, Valleneuva is Mexican, Jocard is South African, Chevalle is Romanian, etc.)

This is all very "Small World"-y, but the pirate Captains actually fit neatly into DuBois' picture, so long as Sparrow is an English, Jocard is a Negro, Sumbhajee a Hindu, and ... well, it gets worse from there. Only one of the Chinese pirates gets to be Mongolian, Vallenueva and Chevalle will have to share "the Romance race," and Barbosa has to choose: Slav or Teuton? But since it's 8 races to 9 Captains, some lucky pirate might end up with no race at all.

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