For my discussion question this week I mentioned that Philip is coming from a postcolonial perspective, and I asked what other critical theories are relevant to this week’s readings. I want to focus especially on a Marxist reading of these three works, although others could be used just as easily. Philip’s Zong! not only rails against the African slave trade, but also against the capitalist system on which it is based. In fact, slavery is the most extreme form of capitalism, because it overtly commodifies human beings, treating them as property and assigning them a dollar value (whereas standard capitalism covertly commodifies human beings). The event that sparked this piece is an insurance claim on the loss of (human) property. In this case, their lives are not even valued, because the owners figure out that they can get more money if the enslaved people are dead. Philip disrupts this system, by using its own documents, breaking them up, and reassembling them to subvert the original purpose. Banner’s Nam and Mohammad’s poems could also be considered Marxist, because they challenge the idea of intellectual property. Banner is basically giving a play-by-play of a film, which she neither wrote nor produced, which raises the question of who really owns the work. Capitalism is very interested in ownership, so that they know who gets paid. Unfortunately, who gets paid is usually not the artist, but the publishing house or film studio (or it is unfairly distributed). By confusing the ownership issue, Banner’s work is also subversive. Similarly, Mohammad’s poetry repurposes other people’s writing from the internet, which is also very close to Goldsmith’s work.