Ranjana Khanna

About

Ranjana Khanna is a Professor of English, Women's Studies, and the Literature Program at Duke University. She works on Anglo- and Francophone Postcolonial theory and literature, as well as Film, Psychoanalysis, and Feminist theory. She has published widely on transnational feminism, psychoanalysis, and postcolonial and feminist theory, literature, and film. Her notable publications include 'Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism' (Duke University Press, 2003) and 'Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the present' (Stanford University Press, 2008). She has also published in various academic journals such as Differences, Signs, Third Text, Diacritics, Screen, Art History, positions, SAQ, Feminist Theory, and Public Culture. Currently, she is working on book manuscripts titled 'Asylum: The Concept and the Practice' and 'Technologies of Unbelonging.' Khanna has held appointments as Professor of English, Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Professor of Literature, and Professor of Gender, Sexuality & Feminist Studies at Duke University.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• Political Science
• Psychoanalysis
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Epistemology
• Linguistics
• Social psychology
• Psychiatry

Selected publications

• Dark Continents

  2003-01-01 · 303 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  In ''Geopsychoanalysis,'' Jacques Derrida comments on the blindness of psychoanalysis to most of the earth, and of what it inscribes on the earth through ''its ongoing worldification,'' that is, a textualization, and the violent event of imposing a way of being in the world. 1 His project is to criticize polemically the politics of the International Psychoanalytic Association, and the treatment of what is dismissed by it as ''the rest of the world,'' in which ''Homo psychoanalyticus is unknown o…

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• Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism

  2003-04-22 · 197 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Genealogies -- Psychoanalysis and archaeology -- Freud in the sacred grove -- Colonial rescriptings -- War, decolonization, psychoanalysis -- Colonial melancholy -- Haunting and the future -- The ethical ambiguities of transnational feminism -- Hamlet in the colonial archive

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• Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects

  Modern Language Quarterly · 2000-12-01 · 77 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Book Review| December 01 2000 Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects. By Emily Apter. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xv + 285 pp.$49.00 cloth, $19.00 paper. Ranjana Khanna Ranjana Khanna Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (2000) 61 (4): 692–696. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-61-4-692 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search S…

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• Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”

  Springer eBooks · 2024 · 45 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
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• Touching, unbelonging, and the absence of affect

  Feminist Theory · 2012-08-01 · 33 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article argues that psychoanalytic notions of affect – including ideas of anxiety and melancholia, as well as deconstructive concepts of auto-affection – offer a feminist ethico-politics and a notion of affect as interface. Beyond the confines of the experiential and the positivist, both psychoanalysis and deconstruction provide insights into affect as a technology that understands the subject as porous. I consider works by Derek Jarman and Shirin Neshat to demonstrate the importance of the…

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Frequent coauthors

• Judith Grbich

  University of Melbourne

  81 shared

• Tony Kaes

  University of Western Australia

  81 shared

• David A. Hollinger

  81 shared

• H.M.J. Maier

  University of Hawaii System

  81 shared

• Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

  81 shared

• Ulf Hannerz

  Stockholm University

  81 shared

• Craig Calhoun

  81 shared

• Emily Apter

  New York University

  81 shared

Awards & honors

• American Council of Learned Societies Emerging Voices Fellow…
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Seminars in Historical, Global,…
• Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation Public Service Prin…

Similar researchers at Duke University

• Toril Moih-28
• Priscilla Waldh-19
• David Aersh-17