Dr Shane Boyle: “Waiting for Ships to Die” - Ever Given & Salvage Spectacles

Dr Shane Boyle: “Waiting for Ships to Die”: Ever Given & Salvage Spectacles

For a week in late March 2021, the grounding of Ever Given revived one of the world’s oldest pastimes: the spectator sport of salvage. Be it the wreckage of a colonial frigate or the ‘stuckness’ of an ultra-large container vessel, crowds have long enjoyed watching ships die. Memes aside, this talk considers Ever Given within an extended history of salvage spectacles so as to consider the continuity of our logistical present with the empires of the past.

While some interpret Ever Given’s grounding and other recent supply chain disruptions as signs of decline, salvaging is essential to the capitalist world-system. Against those who insist that a single stuck ship made visible the logistical workings of global capital, my talk will consider what Ever Given obscured. “Modern logistics,” write Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “was founded in the Atlantic slave trade, founded against the Atlantic slave.” Among the infrastructures that have allowed capitalism to endure include innovations in insurance and salvaging used to hedge against maritime loss.

In addition to surveying a long history of salvage spectacles, this talk explores what can be learned about capitalist salvaging from recent performances that engage with the wasted remains of ships, including the work of Cai Guo-Qiang, the Bow Gamelan Ensemble, Selina Thompson, and the International Transport Workers’ Federation.

Dr Shane Boyle works in the Drama Department at Queen Mary University of London. Most recently he co-edited Postdramatic Theatre and Form (Bloomsbury 2019). This talk draws on the first chapter of his forthcoming book, The Arts of Logistics.