Contribution short abstract:

Juxtaposing ethnographic fieldwork from rural China with the notion of “psychic nowhere” developed in Asian American studies, I consider how the concept might be deployed for rethinking the politics of psychic life across China, ‘greater China,’ and Chinese diasporas.

Contribution long abstract:

Anthropological works have often approached China apart from its diasporic outsides, given a history of disciplinary and conceptual separations. Juxtaposing my ethnographic fieldwork on mediumship and madness in rural China with the recent notion of “psychic nowhere” developed from clinical encounters with a new generation of Chinese immigrants to the U.S. (Eng and Han 2019), I consider how such a psychic nowhere might be deployed as a concept for rethinking the politics of psychic life across China, ‘greater China,’ and Chinese diasporas. This entails revisiting China not as a given entity but as a figure of homeland shaped by ever-shifting mutual imaginaries vis-à-vis the figure of the diasporic. I put this line of thinking in dialogue with recent works on antiblackness to consider how various racial logics of empire, capitalism, and settler colonialism operate to produce distinct, mutually inflected conditions for psychic life.