Speculative Hauntologies: Spectrality, War, and Futurity in The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

This chapter examines Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) using the lens of spectral hauntology to interrogate how speculative fiction reimagines crisis, memory, and futurity in postwar Sri Lanka. Using Jacques Derrida’s theorization of hauntology and its postcolonial extensions by Avery Gordon, the chapter aims to show how the novel’s speculative mode uses the afterlife, ghosts, and queer spectralities to question and resist state-sanctioned histories of closure and reconciliation. The primary finding in the chapter is regarding how Karunatilaka mobilizes speculative tropes to disrupt linear narratives of sovereignty and progress by insisting on the unfinished business of justice, accountability, and belonging. By folding past violence into the present and unsettling triumphalist narratives of peace and development, the novel articulates a haunted futurity that opens space for imagining plural and ethical forms of community beyond nationalist frames. Situated within the thematic concerns of this volume, the chapter demonstrates how speculative hauntology illuminates the entanglement of political and psychological crises in South Asia while expanding the horizons of speculative fiction as a mode of reimagining futures from within the ruins of unresolved pasts.