ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the depiction of shipwreck in two recent Indian Ocean fictions, emphasizing especially the forces of neocolonialism and globalization simultaneously revealed and denounced in these works. Carl de Souza's Ceux quon jette la mer [The Ones Thrown Overboard] is a Mauritian novel that depicts the failed journey of Chinese refugees, whilst Charles Masson's Droit du sol [Soil Right] is a politically charged graphic novel which interrogates Frances colonial presence in Mayotte, an island in the Comoros archipelago offeast Africa, which has been a French overseas department since 2011. Reading these texts in the light of Zygmunt Bauman's sociological polemic Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. The contemporary shipwreck signifies most forcefully not so much the destructive power of nature but rather the human, political, and economic factors which regularly lead to the suffering and death of innumerable boat people, refugees, and migrants in Indian ocean.
