Asylum

"Asylum" and "Unbelonging" a Gender Institute lecture series

In "Asylum: The Concept and the Practice," Professor Khanna will analyse conceptual links among different sites designated by the term "asylum." Extending insights concerning one institutional setting (the mental asylum) to asylum's most expansive version (the nation), she will highlight the manner in which asylums are bound not only by borders but also by strict rules. The space of asylum suggests the rights of institutions over living bodies, rather than the rights of citizens emerging into different spaces. Through figures of sovereignty and subjectivity, asylum highlights the ways in which the sovereign intervenes in lives to formulate concepts of the human and the valuable. This feminist analysis of asylum—related to philosophy, literature, film, art, and architecture—reconceptualises the boundaries of modernism.

Ranjana Khanna is a Professor of English, Literature, & Women's Studies and Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies at Duke University. She works on Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist theory. She has published on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, autobiography, postcolonial agency, multiculturalism in an international context, postcolonial Joyce, Area Studies and Women's Studies, and Algerian film. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2003) and has recently completed a book manuscript entitled Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present (forthcoming Stanford University Press, 2006.) Her current book manuscript in progress is called: Asylum: The Concept and the Practice.

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