This graduate seminar examines East Asia through a "hauntological" lens by focusing on its qualities of "spectrality" made manifest as a spatial, phenomenological, and imaginal condition. At a moment when global geopolitical changes and renewed imperial ambitions consume public attention in the United States and around the world, this seminar attends to the relevance of the lingering past in order to grapple with the contemporary conditions in East Asia. How might renewed attention to the "spectrality" of contemporary Asia's national and interstitial states reorient and destabilize our notions of time, being, and place? Focusing on recent anthropological and ethnographic accounts of the spectral and ethereal in Asia to understand the politics at the margins, this course takes seriously the spectral images, imaginations, and phantoms of inequity, division, and historical legacy, or as Byron Good recently put it, "the anthropology of being haunted" as a means of grappling with the future of Asia as an entity and identity.
3-5 units · Letter or Credit/No Credit
This graduate seminar examines East Asia through a "hauntological" lens by focusing on its qualities of "spectrality" made manifest as a spatial, phenomenological, and imaginal condition. At a moment when global geopolitical changes and renewed imperial ambitions consume public attention in the United States and around the world, this seminar attends to the relevance of the lingering past in order to grapple with the contemporary conditions in East Asia. How might renewed attention to the "spectrality" of contemporary Asia's national and interstitial states reorient and destabilize our notions of time, being, and place? Focusing on recent anthropological and ethnographic accounts of the spectral and ethereal in Asia to understand the politics at the margins, this course takes seriously the spectral images, imaginations, and phantoms of inequity, division, and historical legacy, or as Byron Good recently put it, "the anthropology of being haunted" as a means of grappling with the future of Asia as an entity and identity.
Offered in Spring 2026 at Stanford University.