Stan Douglas: The Enemy of All Mankind

In this stand-alone group of nine images, Douglas stages scenes from the comic opera Polly, written in 1729 by the English dramatist John Gay, using the narrative as a vehicle through which to engage a wide range of themes that remain highly relevant today, including race, class, gender, and media.

Gay’s play centers on Polly Peachum, who sails to the West Indies in search of her estranged husband, Captain Macheath, who has disguised himself as a Black pirate named Morano. There, Polly is unknowingly sold to a wealthy plantation owner as a courtesan. She escapes, disguising herself as a young man to avoid male attention, and finds herself in a series of conflicts among colonial settlers, pirates, and the local native population.

Douglas was intrigued by the play’s radically early depiction of transgender and transracial drag, as well as its satirical critique of England’s colonial presence. In opposition to their barbaric representations in popular culture, the pirates in Polly constitute a kind of protodemocratic “maroon” society at sea, its members enjoying liberal freedoms and political acceptance not afforded to them on the mainland.

A sequel to Gay’s well-known The Beggar’s Opera (which was later adapted by Bertolt Brecht as The Threepenny Opera), Polly satirically highlights the destructive potential of England’s colonial ambitions, as well as the liberties it granted to some but not all of its citizens. The critique proved too trenchant at the time of its writing, and the play was censored by the British government, never staged during Gay’s lifetime.

To create the photographs—which were shot in Jamaica using Hollywood-level production effects—Douglas enlisted a cast of actors to read from a loose script that he adapted for the chosen scenes, modifying certain elements to bring the themes in line with the present day. Rather than posing the players, he photographed them continuously as they acted out and improvised the dialogue. The resulting large-scale photographs take the form of sweeping tableaux where dramatis personae and setting collide in vivid color.

The title of Douglas’s series, The Enemy of All Mankind, is taken from a doctrine of eighteenth-century maritime law—in Latin, hostis humani generis—under which pirates could be attacked by anyone since they fell outside the protection of any nation.

While the lawlessness of pirates is typically depicted as a kind of cartoon danger, Douglas explores that lawlessness for the very potential of its proposition—namely, a radically alternative way of living, outside the restrictive laws that governed the colonial world and, to a degree, govern our world still.