Haunting as Atmospheric Violence

Haunting vividly conjures the past-as-present.¹ For minoritarian subjects, a specter can powerfully incarnate the afterlives of structural violence, yet any concept both enables and forecloses interpretive possibility. What are the limits of haunting’s connection to the spectral human form? This essay both acknowledges and disorients our attachment to the human implicit in the figure of the ghost, the past/present binary it embodies, and the inner/outer, subject/world oppositions that ground our orthodox conceptions of subjectivity. I argue that we can be haunted equally by “vibrations,” “toxicities,” “climate,” “weather” and, especially, “atmosphere”: lingering affective histories that permeate the air, our skin, our unconscious.²

These histories may envelop us from above, and they may emanate from landscapes and objects that constitute our everyday “affective infrastructures,” becoming “atmospheric things.”³ Objects, spaces, light, colors, textures emit powerful atmospheres that haunt through their sensorial properties: the cracks in an uneven brick sidewalk that strip the leather from a kitten heel; the dull brown and white nubbiness of a tweed jacket; “tasteful” displays of Orientalia decorating a dimly lit room.⁴ Humans, too, can become ornamental objects that exude atmospheres. “Exotic”, racialized beings provide “atmosphere” in cinema, performance, and everyday life, as Serna argues in her work on Mexican extras in silent film.⁵ These atmospheres evoke a nexus of cultural meanings, affective geographies, geopolitical and structural histories.⁶

My stakes in atmospheric hauntings arise from my subject position as a Japanese American woman, the child of parents incarcerated in “internment camps,” and as a scholar-playwright-dramaturg disciplined into both Anthropology and East Asian Studies at “Ivy University”, where “toxic atmospheres” of white male dominance were as taken-for-granted as the air. Notably, white male fetishizing of Asian/Asian American women in East Asian Studies assumed forms of harassment and the pairings of white male faculty with Asian wives, who provided linguistic and cultural “access” to the Orient.⁷ Little suggested that a young Asian woman could succeed as a scholar.⁸ After writing two books focused on Japan, I fled Asian Studies for Critical Race Studies, hoping to escape that history.⁹

 Yet the haunting continues. Consider the rise in anti-Asian violence in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, including spectacular acts such as the 2021 shooting of six Asian/American women in Atlanta—Daoyou Feng, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon Chung Park, Xiaojie Tan, and Yong Ae Yue; the killing of Christine Yuna Kim in New York; the death of Michelle Go, who was pushed onto the New York subway tracks.¹⁰ Such events haunt as manifestations of power-laden histories: an Orientalist geopolitics, misogyny, inter-imperial rivalries, and relations of war, invasion, occupation, colonization, that configure Asia and Asians as economic and political threats to U.S. empire. U.S. anti-Asian racism is codified in histories of legal exclusion, including the Page Act of 1875, that policed women’s “morality” and was enforced primarily against Chinese women. Asians and Asian/Americans figure historically as infrahuman beings who embody idées fixes that include exotic sexuality, disease, ineffable foreignness, devious inscrutability, and the robotic.¹¹

The specters of Go, Kim, and the Atlanta Six surely haunt their families and friends as human figures of memory. Yet for Asian American women outside that circle, the anti-Asian, misogynist violence that befalls particular women can transmute into an enshrouding historical atmosphere of misogyny, white supremacy, anti-Asian racism, and the omnipresent threat of sexual/racial violence, from microaggression to rape and murder.¹²

Elaine Hsieh Chou’s novel Disorientation appeared in the aftermath of the spike in (publicized) violence against Asian Americans. Razor-sharp, keenly observed and laugh-out-loud funny, Disorientation vividly depicts the ways power-knowledge—notably, white male supremacy in Asian Studies—legitimizes Orientalist, misogynist violence against Asian American subjects. Chou uncannily reproduces the “atmospheric violence” of my own experiences at Ivy University. She helps us understand that violence is not limited to physical assault and war, but embraces what Fanon calls “peaceful violence that the world is steeped in.”¹³

Disorientation evokes a darkly comedic atmosphere of suspense and mordant humor as Ingrid Yang, a beleaguered Ph.D. student in East Asian Studies at Barnes University in Massachusetts, struggles to complete her dissertation about deceased Chinese American poet Xiao-wen Chou, the erstwhile star of the department. A mysterious note in the archives ignites Ingrid’s curiosity, transforming her dissertation angst into an obsession with the enigma of Xiao-wen. Through the genres of detective caper, academic satire and coming-to-consciousness roman, Disorientation summons the atmospheric haunting pervading the everyday lives of Asian/American women, channeling the rage of the Asian fetish/robot/sex doll/servant into a hilarious, ultimately sobering account of survival.

Haunting occurs on multiple levels: Orientalist stage setting; the racialized, gendered structure of the Department and University; the “malignant mist” represented by her advisor; Ingrid’s “feminist” white boyfriend’s fetishism of Asian women and his psychological gaslighting; the stunning revelation that Xiao-wen Chou is actually a white man, John Smith, in yellowface.¹⁴ Orientalist histories undergird Ingrid’s daily interactions with people and institutional structures. White men assert their supremacy with a contemporary twist, appropriating the language of feminism, therapy speak, and civil rights in the face of their own fear of losing privilege. Here, haunting is not the intrusion of the past into the present. The past is the present.¹⁵

Landscapes and objects can exude, even scream, violent hauntings by class, race, gender, sexuality, ableism, colonialism. For whom, then, is the peaceful violence of normative landscapes peaceful?¹⁶ The Anglophilia/Eurocentricity of place names or the appropriation of indigenous ones, European-inspired architecture, the Euro-norming of everyday life in the U.S. and in academe, constitute ambient reminders of imperial histories. Barnes University and Wittlebury, Massachusetts enact this white-norming. The atmospheres of Ingrid Yang’s hometown required . . . a constant containment of any unchecked . . . chinkiness—this inescapable disease that leaked from her body, face, skin.”¹⁷ Barnes had been “the only segregated university in all of Massachusetts;” its East Asian Studies department “had come under criticism of being ‘89 percent white, 9 percent Asian and 1 percent other’,” reflecting racialized power structures still too common in Asian Studies.¹⁸

The Department’s setting and costume design ooze Orientalist atmosphere, featuring “dark mahogany walls . . . accented with . . . traditional Chinese paintings, characterized by plum tree blossoms, mountains, cranes and peasants bent over rice paddies.”¹⁹ Ingrid’s ponytailed advisor Michael Bartholomew favors “frog-buttoned” shirts and “black Tai Chi slip-on shoes”; his office displays “an artificial bonsai zen garden fountain,” among other Orientalia. Michael’s Chinese wife Cixi, too, is Oriental decoration.²⁰

Orientalist atmospherics assault Ingrid at a performance of a play authored by Xiao-wen. Controversial because a white woman is playing an Asian role, the play is a parade of stereotypes, rendered more horrifying given the rapturous audience reception. Ingrid wonders whether she is hallucinating. I call this feeling—too common when minoritarian subjects view mainstream cultural productions—“affective violence.”²¹ Chou says:

Chou brilliantly captures the ways oppressive ideologies haunt the present. Presumably excised from consciousness, they lurk, resurfacing in the face of affective violence. Chou barrages us; no comma offers respite from the images or enables us to take a breath. The deluge becomes ever more surreal and threatening, as “delicate” Oriental objects alternate with terms depicting stereotypical Oriental qualities. “Mysterious” moves toward “sneaky”, “inscrutable”, and ends with “pestilential plagues.”

 This explosion of the repressed, disorienting Ingrid’s sense of sanity, captures the smothering weight of hauntings by historical trauma. The operations of atmospheric violence recur in a mock trial of Ingrid’s boyfriend, indicted for fetishizing Asian women. Vietnamese American activist Vivian Vo, the prosecutor, offers a numbing litany of 46 films produced from 1922–2016 that “portray Asian women as exotic flower fuck dolls or seductive dragon ladies or heart-of-gold sex workers or just hypersexual fiends.”²³ This relentless archive of images haunts the atmosphere of East Asian Studies and U.S. society more generally.

Ingrid’s hallucinatory experience drives her to out John Smith’s yellowface impersonation of Xiao-wen and the complicity of her advisor, the East Asian Studies department, and the university in the cover-up. Her post creates a firestorm, including the biting comment, “They either want to fuck us, kill us, or be us.”²⁴ The haunting atmospheric violence of anti-Asian Orientalism can shapeshift into multiple forms of dominance: penetration, murder, bodysnatching.

Haunting as atmosphere creates a political conundrum. A human specter might be vanquished by exorcism or resolution of its earthly attachments. Yet how do we vanquish an antagonist that is often indiscernible and elusive, operating as the normal, the unconscious, the air?

The book’s title provides clues. The O.E.D. defines disorientation as: “the condition of having lost one’s bearings; uncertainty as to direction . . . a confused mental state . . . in which appreciation of one’s spatial position, personal identity, and relations, or of the passage of time, is disturbed.” In Disorientation, Ingrid’s hegemonic common sense “is disturbed.” John Smith’s yellowface performance as Xiao-wen, the machinations of Ingrid’s advisor and her boyfriend, blow Ingrid off her “straight”, vertical axis of hegemonic orientation, reorienting her to activism and critical examinations of race. Her orientation “slants” toward her positionality as Asian/American.²⁵

The O.E.D.’s definition of orientation implicitly connects phenomenology and imperialist geographies: “To place or arrange (a thing or a person) so as to face the east.” For people of Southwest Asia/North Africa and for Asian/Americans, “Orient” signifies colonial domination. East of what?²⁶ A foundational critique raised by Asian American scholars and activists lambasted “Oriental” identity formations; we are “Asian American,” a historically specific, relational coalition, not “Orientals”. But (how) can we productively dis-Orient/reorient ourselves to navigate through our atmospheric hauntings?

The novel’s dynamic cover portrays disorientation as both disarray and possibility. We see a Barbie-pink bedroom “in suspension”; a rose-hued door opens to vivid blue sky with cotton-candy clouds.²⁷ Atmospheric objects animating Ingrid’s life are literally up in the air: yellow notebook pages float; a Japanese schoolgirl’s uniform and black loafers rise above the pink bed with its tufted Hollywood headboard; a nightstand teeters; Ingrid’s antacids spill from a bottle suspended in midair; a bedside lamp topples; an “Oriental” vase shatters on the pink carpet; a Wittlebury “waffle dog” flies out the open portal. Will Ingrid soar? Freefall? Both?

The witty diorama captures key elements of Ingrid’s coming-to-consciousness. Her exposure of Orientalist hierarchy forces her to leave academe, and she becomes a customer service representative at Wittlebury’s Waffledog factory. The book leaves us with the image of “John Smith”, who appears briefly at the factory in his new persona: blackface. “He was just another white man taking what wasn’t his to take.”²⁸ Clearly Ingrid has not toppled structures of racism, but by the end she has shifted consciousness and challenged Orientalist hegemonies. Afraid of flying all her life, she now plans a trip to visit Eunice, her Korean American friend doing research in Korea. Her old world disoriented, Ingrid seems ready to fly.

Disorientation, then, evokes pervasive forms of haunting through the atmospheric violence of historical Orientalism exuded by objects, landscapes, people, structures of power. The past haunts the present so thoroughly that distinctions between past and present, human and non-human, subject and world, are dis-oriented. “John Smith” is not a specter, but a contemporary yellowface/blackface impostor who performs haunting legacies of white supremacy. Ingrid’s unconscious archives Oriental stereotypes that haunt U.S. history. Yet through the work of satire, unflinching critique, and compelling evocation, Elaine Chou offers guideposts to re-orient us through our atmospheric hauntings without being completely re-Orientalized. Reimagining the political as both structural and atmospheric, Chou’s work stands alongside critics’ calls for a politics of climate change and revolutionary “counter-moods” that potentially generate new strategies to survive haunting as atmospheric violence.²⁹

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1. Beloved is the locus classicus here, but the last decade has seen the rise of the horror genre for BIPOC artists, in the work of Jordan Peele and television series such as Lovecraft Country. Morrison, famously, links landscape to memory—a concept that encompasses both consciousness and the unconscious—through the riverine. Dammed rivers have memory, she argues. Toni Morrison, Beloved (Vintage, 2007); Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2d ed., ed. William Zinsser (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 83-102.
2. Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2021); Mel Chen, Intoxicated: Race, Disability, and Chemical Intimacy across Empire (Duke University Press, 2023); Roberta M. Hall and Bernice R. Sandler, The Classroom Climate: A Chilly One for Women? (Association of American Colleges, 1982) 23; Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 25.
3. Hannah Knox, “Affective Infrastructures: The Cultural Politics of Infrastructure,” Theory, Culture & Society 34, no. 2–3 (2017): 153; Derek P. McCormack, Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment (Duke University Press, 2018), 45.
4. Gernot Böhme, “Stage-Setting as Atmosphere,” in Atmospheric Spaces: Aesthetic Experiences and Environmental Design, ed. Angela McRobbie (Routledge, 2019), 112.
5. Laura Isabel Serna, “Atmosphere: Mexican Extras and the Production of Race in Silent Hollywood,” JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 63, no. 1 (2023): 100–123, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/cj.2023.a910940.
6. An extensive literature in social and cultural geography, aesthetic philosophy, anthropology, and various locations in the environmental humanities addresses this topic. I discuss minoritarian critique later, but among useful works are Böhme and Griffero in aesthetic philosophy and scholars in Anthropology and literary studies who work with Heideigger’s Stimmung as mood or attunement (Stewart, Flatley). Dora Zhang provides an insightful overview of key moves in this literature and offers “climate change” as a way of re-envisioning political possibility. Gernot Böhme, The Aesthetics of Atmospheres (Routledge, 2017); Jonathan Flatley, “How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made,” New Literary History, 43, no. 3 (2012): 503–525, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23358877; Tonino Griffero, Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces (Routledge, 2016); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (SCM Press, 1962); Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29, no. 3. (2011): 445-453, https://doi.org/10.1068/d9109; Dora Zhang, “Notes on Atmosphere.” Qui Parle 27, no. 1 (2018): 121–155, https://doi.org/10.1215/10418385-4383010.
7. H D. Harootunian, “Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,” Postcolonial Studies 2, no. 2 (1999): 127–47, https://doi.org/10.1080/13688799989715; Shu-mei Shih, “Racializing Area Studies, Defetishizing China,” Positions: Asia Critique 27, no. 1 (2019): 33–65, https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-7251806.
8. One powerful administrator, sitting between the Asian wife of a distinguished white male faculty member and myself, stretched out his hands and proclaimed, “a flower on either side” (the direct translation would be “(in) each hand (a) flower”). We were decorative objects/possessions who enhanced his centrality.
9. Dorinne Kondo, “(Un)Disciplined Subjects: (De)Colonizing the Academy?” in Orientations, eds. Kandice Chuh and Karen Shimakawa (Duke University Press, 2001), 25–40.
10. Giulia Mcdonnell Nieto, “Women of Asian Descent Were 6 of the 8 Victims in Atlanta Shootings,” New York Times, March 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/17/us/asian-women-victims-atlanta-shootings.html; Maia Coleman, “Man Pleads Guilty in Chinatown Killing of Young Woman in Her Apartment,” The New York Times, June 18, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/18/nyregion/suspect-christina-yuna-lee-murder-guilty.html; Anne Branigan, “Michelle Go’s Subway Death Highlights Failures in Public Safety for Women,” The Washington Post, January 19, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2022/01/19/michelle-go-public-safety-women/.
11. See, e.g., Leslie Bow, Racist Love: Asian Abstraction and the Pleasures of Fantasy (Duke University Press, 2022); Anne Anlin Cheng, Ornamentalism (Oxford University Press, 2019); Laura Hyun Yi Kang, Traffic in Asian Women (Duke University Press, 2020); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (University of California Press, 2001); Neferti Xina M. Tadiar, Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong University Press, 2004).
12. Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (One World, 2020); Chanel Miller, Know My Name: A Memoir (Penguin Books, 2020); Erin Khuê Ninh and Shireen Roshanravan, “#WeToo: A Convening,” Journal of Asian American Studies 24, no. 1 (2021): 1–8, https://doi.org/10.1353/jaas.2021.0001; Seo-Young Chu, “A Refuge for Jae-in Doe: Fugues in the Key of English Major,” Entropy, November 3, 2017, https://apa.si.edu/jae-in-doe/.
13. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Grove Press, 2002), 81.
14. Smith is based on the case of Michael Derrick Hudson, who—discouraged with rejections of his poetry —submitted under the Chinese name Yi-Fen Chou and was ultimately published, Controversy ensued. Chen, Ken. “Why a White Poet Posed as Asian to Get Published, and What’s Wrong with That,” NPR, September 10, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch.
15. David L. Eng, The Feeling of Kinship: Queer Liberalism and the Racialization of Intimacy (Duke University Press, 2010); William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun (Vintage Books, 2011). For minoritarian subjects, atmosphere and its related terms acknowledge the pervasiveness of power. Chen’s influential work on race, disability, and toxicities is exemplary here. Racism, colonialism, misogyny, ableism, anti-queer and anti-trans violence are both structural and “in the air,” as Stanley argues. Aijaz’s ethnography of disaster and repair in Kashmir elaborates the concept of “atmospheric violence”. Novelist Bhutto calls violence “atmospheric” and deploys art and writing as survival tactics. Furuhata demonstrates that air conditioning—enabling settlements in “uninhabitable” locales—is a technology of Japanese, U.S., and European imperialist expansion. Simmons writes of “settler atmospherics” at Standing Rock and Gaza, where tear gas, bombs, drones, bullets, toxic particulates weaponize atmospheres. After the murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd, breath demands our critical attention, as Crawley, Choy, and Tremblay remind us. Who can breathe and at what cost? In comparison, Ingrid Yang’s dilemmas seem trivial. But the peaceful violence she encounters daily arises from and reenacts imperial histories, geopolitical Orientalisms, and capitalist rapacity, the haunting atmospheres that pervade the air, the landscape, institutions, and the interpersonal.
16. Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
17. Chou, Disorientation, 111.
18. Chou, Disorientation, 165; 14.
19. Chou, Disorientation, 9.
20. Chou, Disorientation, 94; 11.
21. Dorinne Kondo, Worldmaking: Race, Performance, and the Work of Creativity (Duke University Press, 2018).
22. Chou, Disorientation, 178-179.
23. Chou, Disorientation, 334-5.
24. Chou, Disorientation, 178-179.
25. Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ 12, no. 4 (2006): 54-578, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/202832. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception, trans. James M. Edie (Northwestern University Press, 1964).
26. Edward Said, Orientalism (Pantheon Books, 1978); Candace Chuh and Karen Shimakawa, Orientations: Mapping Studies in the Asian Diaspora (Duke University Press, 2001). Robert Chang, Disorientation: Asian Americans, Law and the Nation-State (NYU Press, 1999).
27. https://www.aleia.net/disorientation
28. Chou, Disorientation, 396.
29. Flatley, “How A Revolutionary Counter-Mood Is Made,” 503-525. See Zhang, “Notes on Atmosphere.”

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  Dorinne Kondo

  Dorinne Kondo is Professor of American Studies and Anthropology and former Director of Asian American Studies at the University of Southern California. A cultural anthropologist, theatre and performance studies scholar, playwright and dramaturg, she is the author of the prize-winning books Crafting Selves: Power, Gender and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace, About Face: Performing Race in Fashion and Theater, and most recently, Worldmaking: Race, Performance and the Work of Creativity.