Volume VI Special Issue VI September 2026

Name of Author : Dr. Diana Agnes, Dr. (Sr.) Amala Valarmathy A

Title of the paper : The Slave Ghost as a Mnemonic Counter Archive: Haunting, Collective Memory, and the Afterlives of Slavery in P. F. Mathews Adiyalapretham and Toni Morrisons Beloved

Abstract: Official history rarely keeps receipts for the enslaved. In institutional archives, these individuals appear as property, cargo, or collateral, never as human subjects. To confront this institutional silence, this paper offers a comparative reading of Toni Morrisons Beloved 1987 and P. F. Mathews Adiyalapretham 2019, exploring how the figure of the slave ghost works to reclaim suppressed histories. Drawing on the foundational insights of Michel Rolph Trouillot, Orlando Patterson, Pierre Nora, Saidiya Hartman, Jacques Derrida, Avery Gordon, and Paul Gilroy, we examine the volatile intersections of archival silence, social death, collective memory, hauntology, and transnational bondage. Through close textual analysis, we argue that both novels deploy spectrality not as a gothic gimmick, but as a mnemonic counter archive, a living repository for stories locked out of official records. While Beloved confronts the structural trauma of the Transatlantic slave trade, Adiyalapretham resurrects the long-ignored history of Indian Ocean slavery through the Malabar Coasts Kappiri tradition. By reading these two texts together, this study pushes comparative memory studies beyond their traditional Atlantic borders, demonstrating how literature steps in as an alternative archive of historical survival.

Keywords : Beloved; Adiyalapretham; slavery; historical memory; hauntology; historical silencing; comparative literature; Transatlantic slavery; Indian Ocean slavery.

DOI :

Page Number : 236-245