Asylum (The Concept and the Practice)

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 a diversity of forms of migration are assessed in the terms of a new set of moral criteria concerning the right to political asylum. Simultaneously signifying safety and incarceration, Khanna shows how postcolonial asylum constructs spaces of hospitality and hostility that render divisions between the human and nonhuman, dignity and shame, value and disposability. Khanna demonstrates that 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.