Spectral diaspora and queer archives: hauntology, memory, and decolonial time in Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night

This article argues that Zeyn Joukhadar’s The Thirty Names of Night (2020) builds a spectral diasporic archive: a transregional field of ghosts, diaries, drawings, and more-than-human signs through which queer belonging becomes legible without being stabilised into an origin story. The novel’s central materials – the nightly visitation of a mother lost to a suspicious fire, the rediscovered diary of the Syrian émigré artist Laila Z., and the uncanny gathering of birds over New York – function less as gothic atmosphere than as archival technologies. Read through Derridean hauntology and queer diaspora’s minor/affective archives, these elements disturb the secular, heteronormative expectation that history should move forward cleanly (from past → explanation → closure). Instead, Joukhadar stages decolonial time as a practice: a way of living with what cannot be fully verified by official records, while still refusing the comfort of forgetting. Spectrality here is not restoration. It is transmission – an ethics of receiving fragments and letting them re-order the present toward futures not authorised by colonial or reproductive chronologies.