Rebirth as Redemptive Spectrality: Hauntological Narratives in Li Ang’s Paranormal Trilogy

Abstract

Li Ang’s paranormal trilogy— Visible Ghosts , Possession , and The River Woman Beyond —employs ghostly narratives to stage the intersection of historical trauma, gendered violence, and ethical reckoning. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s hauntology and Judith Butler’s theory of grievability, this article argues that the ghost in Li Ang’s fiction functions not merely as a motif but as a structural condition of perception and narration. Across the trilogy, spectrality becomes the medium through which histories are re-entered, not to restore coherence but to expose absence, injury, and unresolved memory. Li Ang does not simply represent the paranormal; she inhabits it. Through increasingly self-referential writing, she stages haunting as a feminist modality of critique and redemption. The paranormal, in this context, is neither superstition nor metaphor—it is the very terrain through which the unspeakable is rendered thinkable, and the unreadable, legible.