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Asylum

The Concept and the Practice

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Book

Pages: 224

Illustrations: 18 illustrations

Release Date: December 15, 2026

Author: Khanna, Ranjana

In Asylum, Ranjana Khanna examines how sanctuaries, refugee camps, mental asylums, holding facilities for asylum seekers, and state boundaries are all understood through the term asylum. Engaging with continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary theory, postcolonial studies, and Marxist critique, Khanna considers the multiple and entangled senses of asylum in the histories of mental health, incarceration, and human rights. She shows that diverse forms of migration are now assessed in terms of a new set of moral criteria concerning the right to political asylum. She further shows how postcolonial asylum, simultaneously signifying safety and incarceration, constructs spaces of hospitality and hostility that render divisions between the human and nonhuman, dignity and shame, and value and disposability. As Khanna demonstrates, the notion of asylum reveals the importance of sovereignty as understood through the formulation and imposition of the concepts of the human and of the valuable.

Praise

“An incisive and ambitious call for a new ethical vision. This compelling book asks us to reimagine asylum in its multiple trajectories in order to rethink, within a global frame, our ideas about hospitality, mourning, dignity, value, and futurity. Drawing on a wide range of thinkers, Ranjana Khanna deliberately roams with deft insights across the history of a discontinuous concept, showing the work it does in relation to key notions such as sanctuary, refugee, psychiatric incarceration, migration, and forcible displacement.” - Judith Butler, author of Who’s Afraid of Gender?: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

“Ranjana Khanna’s new book, Asylum: The Concept and the Practice, shows a remarkable critic working at the peak of her abilities and engaging a topic whose urgency fuels our headlines every day. We can only hope her analysis, both rigorous and dazzling, will help us rethink the question of asylum with the intelligence modeled here.” - Lee Edelman, author of Bad Education: Why Queer Theory Teaches Us Nothing

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Ranjana Khanna is Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute and Professor of English, Literature, and Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, also published by Duke University Press, and Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present.

Table Of Contents

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Preface  vii
Introduction  1
I. Hospitality 23
1. Sovereign Right; or, Asylum in the Feminine  25
2. On the Right to Sleep, Perchance to Dream  45
3. The Lumpenproletariat, the Subaltern, the Mental Asylum  59
II. Indignity  71
4. Indignity  73
5. Rex; or, the Negation of Wandering  101
III. Value  115
6. Disposability  117
7. Hope, Demand, and the Perpetual  133
Coda. Speculation; or, Beside the Corpse  147
Notes  173
Bibliography  189
Index

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3941-9 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3447-6 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6306-3 /