ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Sociol.
Sec. Sociology of Law
This article is part of the Research TopicThe Role of Community in Restorative JusticeView all articles
Spectral Interlocutions and the Politics of Unfinished: Buddhism, Haunting, and Memory in Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Provisionally accepted
- VIT University Chennai, Chennai, India
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Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) offers a reimagined depiction of the Sri Lankan civil war aftermath in the context of restorative justice. It offers a discussion of how haunting serves as a sociological process for truth-telling, recognition, and reconciliation within post-war Sri Lanka. Using a theoretical approach rooted in Derrida's hauntology, Avery Gordon's notion of haunting, and Buddhist cosmology in the sociology of literature framework, this research examines how the novel reworks the afterlife as a site of moral and collective accountability. The war photographer, Maali Almeida, who died during the civil war, is a witness. Through his ghostly presence, he forces the living to reveal hidden atrocities and acknowledges collective damage. His haunting challenges political amnesia. And it represents how memory, justice, and healing are indistinguishably related in a violence-plagued society. Finally, by imagining haunting as a metaphor and a means of restorative justice, the paper argues that Karunatilaka's novel does not imagine reconciliation through retribution or denial, but in terms of truth-telling, memory, and ethical liberation.
Keywords: Buddhism, Hauntology, Memory, Restorative justice, Spectrality, Sri Lanka
Received: 24 Sep 2025; Accepted: 08 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 HUMPHRY and I. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: AJIT I
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