Where the War Never Ended: Hauntology and the Post-War Afterlife in Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War

This article examines the spectral afterlife of Sri Lanka’s civil war through a reading of Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War (2014). Drawing on the hauntological framework developed by Jacques Derrida and expanded by Mark Fisher and Merlin Coverley, it explores how trauma, erasure, and surveillance continue to shape Sri Lanka’s postwar landscape. The analysis focuses on spatial and symbolic registers of haunting—erased cemeteries, repurposed monuments, militarized zones, and national iconography—that embed violence into the everyday. Through close attention to narrative testimonies, public memory, and the affective politics of fear, the article situates Subramanian’s work as a counter-archive that disrupts official narratives of reconciliation. In tracing how the ghosts of ethnic division inhabit space, gesture, and silence, the article highlights hauntology’s relevance for understanding the unfinished aftermath of conflict and the spectral condition of peace.