Exploring Hauntology and Feminine War Memory in "White Chrysanthemum" and "The Mountains Sing"

Situated at the intersection of spectrality, memory, and liminality, contemporary historical fiction increasingly examines how the past exists in the present through unresolved traces of trauma. Hauntology, as a theoretical perspective, describes the role played by specters, as “revenants” and “arrivants” in defining what is forgotten and what needs to be freed from silence. This article presents a critical reading of The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai and White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lynn Bracht using the Hauntological framework and gynocentric narration, in order to review the spectral remnants of women’s war memories from Vietnam and Korea. Using hauntology, this article argues that the memories of trauma and violence in Korean and Vietnamese contexts exist as spectral traces, continually haunting the present and reconstructing histories through their resurgence. Centering around the arguments of Maureen T. Stanley, the study also focuses on “gendered omissions within cultural memory”, and explains the role played by gynocentric narrations in cultural retrieval. Reading the selected texts from the perspective of femimemory and hauntology, the article traces diverse narratives of displacement through the perspectives of female characters from the selected novels, thereby foregrounding the spectral presence of a historically silenced past.