Preface: Hauntographies of Ordinary Shipwrecks

Summary

Abstract

To preface the five chapters and postface to come, the role of shipwrecks in the modern imaginary is explored before examining the common ground between art and archaeology. The term hauntography is defined as a creative process that combines the methods of Bogost's alien phenomenology— ontography, metaphorism, and carpentry—to attempt comprehension and communication of an object that is absent and present, bygone and enduring. To encounter a shipwreck underwater is a brush with the uncanny, the eerie, and the weird, but also the sublime and wondrous. Hauntography works to edge closer toward an ontological recognition of an inscrutable entity. Beginning with a personal apologia of sorts, the preface concludes by summarizing the arguments and evidence to follow.

Keywords: alterity; blue humanities; hauntology; nautical archaeology; object-oriented ontology; sci-art

Sometimes, students and colleagues at conferences ask me how a farm girl from rural Kansas grew up to study shipwrecks. It's a reasonable question, but to answer it requires going back in time a little—first a generation, then a geological era. Despite having also grown up on that same farm, my father was a Seabee in the US Navy, and given that I was born on a Virginia Navy base before moving back to my family's homestead in Kansas as a toddler, I spent the first couple years of my life breathing salty air. Maybe this natal exposure to oceanic natrium even led me back to the shores of the Atlantic, on either side of which I’ve been living for the last several years.

But despite all this skirting of the Atlantic, there's also an undeniable—if latent—oceanic force deep within the prairie. This force silently swells up from the vast flatness of the limestone. Riddled with monstrous fossils, the calcareous limestone was formed in the Mesozoic era when Kansas was an inland sea. Where there once was saltwater and unimaginable creatures in it, there now grow tall grasses and grains that, while concealing more imaginable creatures, undulate against a seemingly infinite horizon. In Kansas, uncannily, the ancient sea is ever-present.