Unbelonging

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

More often than not, a sense of belonging to a nation or a community has been deemed or imagined positive. This talk explores how many contemporary artists use and cite different forms of technology as a way of proposing a state of unbelonging. This state is not accompanied by any affect of sadness, but rather one of liminality and demetaphorization that forms an unidentifiable relation, or at least living with the other with whom no identification can take place. Senses are then the very matter of sharing and division, attraction and repulsion, and the decision to be part of collective sensual labor. Commonality can only be found then as it is sensed as coming undone through non-identification, demetaphorization, unworking, and the sense of the liminal. The sight of the face, the reception of a letter, or participation in a conversation become less an opening to familairity and dialogue than a shared sense of belonging as enslavement, and the sense of unbelonging.

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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