The ghost as a literary figure has been interpreted multiple times: spiritually, psychoanalytically, sociologically, or allegorically. Following these approaches, Janna Odabas understands ghosts in Asian American literature as self-reflexive figures. With identity politics at the core of the ghost concept, Odabas emphasises how ghosts critically renegotiate the notion of 'Asian America' as heterogeneous and transnational and resist interpretation through a morally or politically preconceived approach to Asian American literature. Responding to the tensions of the scholarly field, Odabas argues that the literary works under scrutiny openly play with and re-think conceptions of ghosts as mere exotic, ethnic ornamentation.

Janna Odabas, born in 1984, completed the program of the Graduate School of North American Studies at the Free University in Berlin. In 2014, she received the Young Scholar Excellence Award of the Society for Multi-Ethnic Studies: Europe and the Americas (MESEA). Her work focuses on questions of identity and migration.