Un/fielding the spectral ‘non-site’ in Sri Lanka
Siriwardane-de Zoysa, RaptiExterne Publikationen (2025)
in: Dependent 25 (1) (Magazine of the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies), 54-56
The genres of nautical horror and the maritime gothic are awash with ghost ships – ethereal vessels adrift, some crewless and rotting, others bearing strange cargo or cursed fates. In colonial and postcolonial seascapes, these spectral ships have long served as metaphors of empire, conquest, and maritime violence – imperial phantoms like De Vliegende Hollander or the Mary Celeste. From the slave ship to the quarantined plague ship, the ocean’s gothic imagination is inseparable from its histories of
extraction, contagion, and abandonment.
