The politics of the untranslated: an affective-discursive approach to Somali pirates in A Hijacking

ABSTRACT

Adopting an Affective-Discursive approach, this article explores the visual and textual representations of Somali Pirates in the Danish Film A Hijacking, which is based on true events. I argue that the lack of subtitles for exchanges in the Somali language, camera treatment of the pirates, and the juxtaposition between sound and editing techniques used to capture the pirate and the western crew, have resulted in a screen production that not only masks the complexities of the piracy enterprise but also marginalizes Somali pirates and their truths, portraying them as little better than savages. This irreducibility between image and text will also be a key point of departure for examining the figure of the pirate as an affective/abjective/monstrous construction, rather than simply a discursive/textual one.

KEYWORDS:

• Affective-discursive
• A Hijacking
• film representations
• Somali pirates

Acknowledgements

The author would like to express her gratitude to Dr Idil Osman from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) for translating some of the Somali exchanges into English.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Salam Al-Mahadin http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8326-9694