Throughout Western history, shipwrecks have been muses for art and literature, and more importantly, they have been both metaphors and metonyms for larger subjects and processes such as empire, colonialism, and modernity itself. When a ship fails in its mission, it becomes a vessel for narratives of loss, trauma, and fragility. At the same time, until very recently the scholarship on shipwreck has been limited to maritime history, with its emphasis on the technological, legal, and economic elements of sea travel. This panel takes a different approach, drawing on key critical and conceptual tools to make sense of maritime disaster. We are American studies scholars, art historians, Indigenous studies historians, and literary scholars, and this panel is intended to bring these interdisciplinary perspectives together to limn the ways in which shipwreck can open up key critical conversations about not just the specifics of marine misfortune, but the relationship between archive, discipline, and theory. Our first paper examines the Portuguese musical genre of fado and its related concept of saudade, and brings them together with the history of slavery, asking “What is a shipwreck to a slave?” The second paper focuses both on the Iberian colonial world in the early modern period and the present day, to look at the ways in which shipwrecked vessels both articulate imperial histories and serve modern desires for reclamation and rescue. The third and final paper centres on the intersections of one shipwreck on the northwest coast of North America and queer theories of failure as a method for destabilizing—or even capsizing—colonial narratives of inevitability and emphasizing Indigenous survivance in coastal spaces. Together, the three papers intend to break the boundaries of what we talk about when we talk about shipwreck.