Alternate Neurodivergent Lives: Spectral Conversations with Anh Vo

Critical Neurodiversity Studies takeover: Protichi Chatterjee journeys towards a neurodivergent epistemology beyond Western diagnostic frameworks, via the work of Vietnamese choreographer and writer, Anh Vo.

I see you swaying in front of a photograph of death. A can of petrol next to a monk who is self-immolating. You say that “[t]he body is not an ‘I,’ nor is it mine” (Vo 2024). It belongs to your named and unnamed ancestors. You were “asking for the ghosts to come dance with [you], and yet somehow… they… stayed on and haunted” you (Vo 2023). You are at once possessed on stage and haunted by the ghosts of Operation Babylift. Untimely, violent deaths. You speak in different voices to recreate the performative speech acts (“To freedom!”; “To war!”) of the imperialist wars (Vo 2021, 20:36-24:19). You sway, slither, and twerk as a witness to violence perpetrated. Manic-depressive. Highs and lows. Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of affect, drawing from Spinoza, is also about highs and lows: affect is the change in the state of the body’s capacity to affect and be affected (Deleuze 1988, 49). Manic-depressive. Highs and lows, as you sometimes energetically twerk on stage, offering your body for the eroticism of the ghosts’ selves and sometimes slowing your body down to the barest hum of movement discernible, as they possess you. Your body’s capacity to affect and be affected by apparitional forces (and not by any DSM categorisations) resonates throughout the stage as your muscles undulate poetically under the intoxication of spirits. Your body’s agency, mine, too, through a strange spectral relationality, is a slow accommodation, of making room within yourself for the spectral Other (Ram 2013, 255) to bear witness to generational and historical atrocities (Vo 2021).

Haunted epistemologies and inherited ghosts

Can haunting, then, have an epistemology of its own? I often find myself asking this question as I am visited by my own inherited ghost. Can the experience of being haunted by one’s ancestor, generationally, ever escape the clutches of medicine, science, classification systems, and the all-pervasive gaze of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (American Psychiatric Association 2013)? My ghost is inherited, like yours, Anh. I, like my mother before me, often am in the company of a girl in an old pinafore Bengali-baatik printed frock stitched from old sarees, her hair tied in pigtails. She always smiles and stands in front of me. Her gaze pierces through my skin. My mother had theorised that she was her sister, who was killed before she took a living breath; her world was the womb of my grandmother, from which she was erased. Like your unnamed ancestors, Anh, she was also taken away violently, unnamed. Kalpana Ram has written in her ethnographic work that in southern India:

[p]henomenon that are distinguished in Western constructions, such as sterility, miscarriage, and even infant death, all fall under the broader category of infertility… [and] these phenomena in turn may come to be diagnosed as the site of spirit trouble.

(Ram 2013, 107)

In the limited sphere of my lived world, in Chhattisgarh, the inability to give birth to a son also becomes a sign of infertility — unholy womb, cursed and infertile, a sign of sins from one’s previous life. This, too, becomes a site for spirit trouble. Especially for me and my mother. My aunt comes back through us as yours comes back through your dancing body. My ghost, similar to yours, is an epistemology of genocide, female infanticide, and gender-based violence. 

Your performance, Babylift (Vo 2021), tells me that the experiences of being haunted and being possessed can have their unique epistemologies if only we allow them to unshackle themselves from the marginal position Western modernity has sequestered them to. Ghosts have become a thing of an unenlightened past, folk tales, and the subject of popular horror films. For us, in the Indian subcontinent, the reformist colonial modernity and the cultural interpellation of Science (Prakash 1999, 4-5) has marginalised popular, folk epistemologies of spirits, jinns, demons, paris, etc., in all religious practices as irrational, mad, and superstitious (Taneja 2017, 08). 

Unaware of the generational nature of my spirit trouble, I approached a psychiatrist. I was subsequently diagnosed with Bipolar Affective Disorder with Schizoaffective tendencies – irrational, mad, and superstitious. A neat, differential diagnosis was picked from the DSM and applied to my case. I struggled with the label and medication. A cocktail of Lithium Valproate with medicines for hallucination, depression, and insomnia entered and marked my bodymind. My ghost still did not disappear, and I, afraid of more medication, hid this from my psychiatrist. If only I could have spoken via your dance, then; if only Babylift had existed, then!

Experiences at the fringes of experience

It was after being failed by the medico-psychiatric system that I entered the discourse of Neurodiversity, wanting affirmation and acceptance. But, tentatively, because “[t]hose who share a form of neurodivergence – such as bipolar or hearing voices – may be referred to as a ‘neurominority’” (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Chown and Stenning 2020, 1; see also Huijg, Chown, and Stenning 2020). Even within the welcoming label of neurominority which freed me from the pathological model of science that saw me as deficient, I found myself at the fringes, about to be expelled for my spectral affliction, precisely because I could not comfortably relate to the terminologies of bipolarity and schizophrenia, and instead roamed dangerously close to Theology. However, there was a possibility of thinking of neuro-divergences, some idea, a glimmer and a hope, that one can diverge from the Western-rationality backed classification system of mental disorders and still be considered neurodivergent precisely because the limiting ideas of rationality are challenged within the framework of neurodiversity (Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Chown and Stenning 2020, 1). But it was with your performance, Babylift, that I found a way of expressing what hauntings make known – a call to witness violence. As you slither onto the stage and pay homage to the photograph of self-immolation (already making present on stage the ghost of the monk) and the makeshift shrine of children’s toys, a strange spectrality occupies the affective space of the screen on which I watch you. You summon the ghosts of the Vietnamese children who died because of the U.S. Operation Babylift during the Vietnam War. You write that the children are your ancestors, a genealogy that connects your living, dancing body to those who have died violent deaths (Vo 2021). All “phantoms are intent on conveying to the world the violent circumstances of their deaths… [and they] continue to hunger for human beings who will bear witness” (Ram 2013, 87-88). Your performance attempts to accomplish exactly this act of witnessing.     

How does a ghost voice its injustice? You claim that ghosts manifest via erotic hauntings, sometimes by entering your dancing body and compelling manic, repetitive movements and voices that span over decades and people, and sometimes, post-performance, by refusing to leave the world of the living and haunting you by putting your bodymind under the arresting gaze of depression (Vo 2023). My aunt makes her voice known to me and my mother via her insistent presence in front of us, asking us to bear witness to her. I, too, am compelled to perform manic, repetitive movements of grazing my body, and my mother does so via her grazing words. My aunt’s violent death is carried on our bodies as we inherit her injustice.

Can a ghost make itself known? “Ghosts [ultimately] are not purely internal; they are not experienced as manifestations of the subject’s mental states. But neither do they have the ’objective’ status of other beings in the world that share with humans a material, tangible quantity” (Ram 2013, 87). To look at them in either way is to lose their epistemology altogether. Babylift provides a language made up of gestures and affects for the ghosts who are invited onto the stage. A compulsion to bear witness to colonial atrocities by the U.S. imperial machine is made manifest. By combining Buddhist ritualistic chants with Vietnamese folk practices, interspersed with events and encounters from popular culture and political speech acts, you breathe new life into the ghosts. Your body becomes the medium or vessel in which the afterlives of the victims of Operation Babylift are poured: “To be affected by a ghost is to risk bringing it to life in one’s own body” (Ram 2013, 105). With your performance as my epistemological framework, I revisit my experience of being haunted, generationally, as a mode of bearing witness, of interrelationality with the spectral world made marginal by dominant discourses of psychiatry (backed by reason and rationality) and neurodiversity (which carry on with the same labels of the diagnosis found in the DSM).

Alternate neurodivergent lives?

As I watch you, I, too, do what Kalpana Ram surmised and you performed: I make adjustments, slowly accommodating my Othered, murdered ancestor with me, in me, and around me (Ram 2013, 255). In deep relationality with you through this piece of ‘spirited’ writing, there might be a possibility of yet another form of neurodivergence. This one would be haunted and haunting – one that defies any medical/identitarian categorisations. Rather, it would be a genealogy of violence inherited by us, which might result in often unexpected variations of relating, perceiving, and sensing the world around us.

About the author

Protichi Chatterjee (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for English Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, India. She is currently attempting to create a methodology that encapsulates the shifting, unsteady terrain of alternate non-Western neurodivergent experiences within her thesis by experimenting with autofictional/autotheoretical frameworks. You can find her on Bluesky: @protichichatterjee.bsky.social. The current work has been generously supported by the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities, Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University, and funded by the Wellcome Trust.

About the Critical Neurodiversity Studies Conference

Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Directions/Intersections/Contradictions is a free fully-hybrid international conference taking place from 24-26 June 2025 at Durham University and online. It is believed to be the first formal research event in the field undertaken at this scale, responding to a gathering energy and engagement with neurodiversity across disciplines and methodologies. The conference takeover of The Polyphony runs from 23-30 June, with the full collection of articles available under the Critical Neurodiversity Studies Conference 2025 tag.

References

American Psychiatric Association. 2013. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5. Washington, D.C: American Psychiatric Association.

Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Hanna, Nick Chown, and Anna Stenning. 2020. “Introduction.” In Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm, 1–12. Routledge Advances in Sociology. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1988. Spinoza, Practical Philosophy. Translated by Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Huijg, Dyi Diuwertje, Nick Chown, and Anna Stenning. 2020. “Neuronormativity in Theorising Agency: An Argument for a Critical Neurodiversity Approach.” In Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm, 213–17. Routledge Advances in Sociology. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis group.

Prakash, Gyan. 1999. Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.

Ram, Kalpana. 2013. Fertile Disorder: Spirit Possession and its Provocation of the Modern. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.

Taneja, Anand Vivek. 2017. Jinnealogy: Time, Islam, and Ecological Thought in the Medieval Ruins of Delhi. South Asia in Motion. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Vo, Anh (director). 2021. Babylift. Multimedia. Performance Art and Dance. New York: Target Margin Theater. https://www.anhqvo.com/babylift. Accessed 17 June 2025. 

Vo, Anh. 2023. “The Apparitional Force of Dancing.” AVO (personal blog). https://www.anhqvo.com/theapparitionalforceofdancing2023. Accessed 17 June 2025.

Vo, Anh. 2024. “Some Hypotheses on Being Possessed: The Body as a Vessel.” AVO (personal blog). 2024. https://www.anhqvo.com/somehypothesesonbeingpossessed. Accessed 17 June 2025.