Haunting Nation: Supernaturalism and Lao-ness in the Siri Paiboun Crime Series

Abstract

This article is a study of Colin Cotterill’s postcolonial crime series (2004-2016), employing the concepts of time, historical narrative and spectrality. Comprising eleven novels, it features Siri Paiboun, the national coroner of the newly-established Lao People’s Democratic Republic. In the novels, not only does supernaturalism constitute a sign of repressed guilt, it also plays a crucial role in offering clues to Siri’s unsolicited investigative enterprise. Nevertheless, supernaturalism transcends the fulfilment of personal needs. It helps reconfigure a shared consciousness among the Lao people, or Lao-ness, via history and time. Its haunting property discloses a possible coexistence of multiple temporalities, and, therefore, poses a considerable challenge to official historical narratives by allowing voices of the oppressed to be heard in counter-narratives.