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Abstract

The politics of mourning in Shehan Karunatilaka's The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) and Paul Lynch's Prophet Song (2023) is explored in this study from a cultural and socio-political viewpoints. Although the concept of trauma and memory has been studied in recent Anglophone fiction, there is comparatively little work considering mourning as a political practice in geopolitical difference. This study fills this gap, in the context of mourning as a resistance, in post-civil war Sri Lanka and authoritarian Ireland. The study uses qualitative comparative textual analysis as conceptual frameworks, which were developed by Judith Butler with her concept of grievability, and Achille Mbembe with his concept of necropolitics. It examines how both novels depict mourning as a political gesture that intervenes in the political control of memory, visibility and public mourning by the state. The fidings suggest that both novels make mourning a place of contestation of political violence and erasure of history. While Lynch's normalizing of disappearance is through the suppression of the public expression of grief, Karunatilaka's is through the bureaucracy of the afterlife and spectral narration. The study concludes that mourning is a political language in which the subjects of the margins are given back their visibility, challenged with the power of necropolitics and with the control of the State regarding memory, life and death.

Keywords

Politics of mourning, Grievability, Necropolitics, Postcolonial fiction, Cultural memory, State violence, Dystopian literature, Memory and trauma

Article Type

Article

First Page

183

Last Page

196

Publication Date

9-15-2026

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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