Ghosts as Political Possibilities: A Review of Instantiations of Haunting in Southeast Asia

In Southeast Asia, instantiations of haunting often disrupt dominant time in ways that force an encounter with the state. This article considers how ghosts disrupt temporality to make new political possibilities. It explores the ways through which ghosts destabilize the linearity of standard time to inscribe heterogenous planes of time that open up to alternative political visions. Through reexamining case studies of haunting in Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia, it also considers whether the political possibilities embodied by ghosts are capable of sustaining a political project. This article argues that while ghosts can disrupt time to gesture toward political action, a disruption that contains the potential for new political possibilities, they cannot always fulfill those possibilities. That is, the capacity for disruption always contains the possibility for co-optation. This article suggests, however, that the precarity to haunting is also a precarity proper to hope. Ghosts can suggest that the normal might yet be unsettled.