5 - Spectres, Ships, and a Sea of Stories

Through a range of vessels, figures and objects that traversed the oceans across millennia, this paper presents speculative and embodied histories. Thematically, it considers the potential of contamination through processes of accidental, forced, or voluntary assimilations across the Indian and Atlantic Oceans of people, animal, natural histories, devotion and “friendship” and “gifts”. This reexamination becomes particularly urgent with the launch and development of the Chinese Belt and Road initiative and the spectral emergence of the (contested figure of) Admiral Zheng He. The search for evidence of their voyage across the seven seas, is to divine a history of the seas with China and Asia at the center. What can we imagine as frameworks that came before the silk and colonial trade routes? What figures, mystical and mythical, contribute to this imagination? How is exile, beyond enslavement and labour, a third history of these oceans? Essentially using “gaps” like those emerging from the folly of flattening unique regional conditions into umbrella histories and large geographical classifications, this paper uses images, incidents, stories, and rumors, along with material histories of goods, to challenge large, state-prescribed narratives with the soft, membranous possibility of circumstance and chance.