Mapping ocean-state Mauritius and its unlaid ghosts: Hydropolitics and literature in the Indian Ocean

Abstract

In the wake of what has been termed “the scramble for the oceans,” the Republic of Mauritius lodged an application in 2012 with the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) to recognize its rights to an Exclusive Economic Zone that comprises a large expanse of the Indian Ocean, and subsequently redefined itself as an ocean-state. This new configuration raises as many issues as it answers. The Indian Ocean remains firmly central both to Mauritian history and to its imaginary. All at once, the endless fluidity of the ocean renders material traces and academic archeology harder, yet somehow it traps and sediments memory and meaning in some ways more profoundly than land. This article bores and drills into the historical, geopolitical, and ontological depths of ocean-state Mauritius with the figure of the ghost as motif, metaphor, and witness.