Interview from
Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire

Sarah Milroy: I’d like to talk for a bit about The Enemy of All Mankind, your new series of large-scale photographs that also deals with themes of colonialism. It’s based on the eighteenth-century playwright John Gay’s little-known work Polly, which he wrote after The Beggar’s Opera. Preparing for this interview, I confess I went down a rabbit hole of British satirical cartooning in the eighteenth century—artists like Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray. This was truly a golden age of satire. How did you find your way to John Gay? Of course, he’s sort of the British literary equivalent of those cartoonists. 

Stan Douglas: I’ve always been a fan of The Threepenny Opera by Bertolt Brecht and Elisabeth Hauptmann, which was based on Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera. But I came upon Polly while doing research on pirates, and in a book on the early economy of the Atlantic called The Many-Headed Hydra there is a detailed discussion of various pirate cultures and a chapter on John Gay’s Polly. And I’m like, What the hell is John Gay’s Polly? 

SM: Let’s back up a bit. Why were you interested in pirates? 

SD: Freedom, I suppose, by way of the condition of the Maroon. A Maroon community is one composed of people who had escaped slavery and claimed an intentional, positive freedom for themselves. We presume we’re free in the “free world,” but it’s a passive freedom from rather than an active freedom to. Maroons were free in a way that we really can’t ever be. In seventeenth-century Brazil, the jungle was dotted with mocambos, villages created by Maroons. Some of these were organized into a republic called the Quilombo dos Palmares, which established a representative democracy. 

SM: Were pirates usually Maroons? 

SD: They were, in effect. They had often been part of a mutiny and taken control of a ship. The communities aboard these ships were very diverse. During the enclosures in eighteenth-century England, common land was seized from farmers and others who lived off the land—they were displaced. All kinds of people became vagrants and ended up in jail or debtors’ prison. The government had created a criminal class they could imprison, then exploit to staff the Royal Navy. As these ships cycled around the Atlantic, some sailors would escape and new ones would be picked up along the way, so you might have a mix of French, Spanish, English, and Irish speakers as well as Indigenous and Black people as crews on the ships. When sailors mutinied against dictatorial officers, they established an economy of equal shares, and the pirate ships became, in effect, Maroon communities on the water. 

SM: What stood out for you about Gay’s Polly? 

SD: When I finally got a copy of Polly, it was just insane—the story depicts race and gender as performative and satirizes upper-class financial chicanery, and it was written in 1729. The play was controversial and was banned in Gay’s time. But it was serialized, so it became very popular, nonetheless. But Gay never saw it produced on stage in his lifetime because the powers that be thought it might’ve been satirizing them—which of course it was. In Gay’s play, Macheath (aka Mack the Knife in The Threepenny Opera) is sent to the West Indies as an indentured labourer. Upon arrival, he escapes and masquerades as a Black man, Morano, in blackface, which I didn’t want to do. So I just flipped it around and made Macheath a Black man masquerading as white in the UK and then lets his hair grow out when he gets to the Caribbean. 

SM: When you look at what John Gay had his finger on in the eighteenth century, and you think about presenting The Enemy of All Mankind today, I wonder—is this a perfect tale for our times? 

SD: Maybe the idea of rogue nations that didn’t exist to the extreme degree that they do now. The phrase “enemy of all mankind” comes from a legal doctrine in which pirates are identified as not under any kind of flag, so they’re kind of free game for anybody. Any nation can attack and board their ships.