Scholars@Duke
Ranjana Khanna

Ranjana Khanna

Professor of English
English
rkhanna@duke.edu
Duke Box 90015, Durham, NC 27708
304GH Allen Bldg, Duke University, Durham, NC 27708
Office hours Spring '25 Semester:

(304GH Allen)  

Selected Publications

Sex and Death; or, The Problem of Thinking Comparatively

Journal Article Comparative Literature · September 1, 2025 Full text Cite

Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”

Chapter · January 1, 2024 This chapter on melancholy/melancholia addresses the use of these categories over the last 30 years in the analysis of cultural difference associated with race, gender, and sexuality. In particular, I will address the different trajectories that emerge in ... Full text Cite

Touching the corpse: Reading Sinan Antoon

Journal Article New Literary History · March 1, 2020 Full text Cite

Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam

Journal Article Psychoanalysis and History · December 2019 Full text Cite

Speculation; Or, living in the face of the intolerable

Journal Article Journal of Middle East Women S Studies · March 1, 2018 Full text Cite

Stranger

Journal Article New Literary History · March 1, 2018 Full text Cite

Stranger

Journal Article NEW LITERARY HISTORY · 2018 Cite

On the name, ideation, and sexual difference

Journal Article Differences · September 1, 2016 The term gender has, for many years, been invoked as if it solved all the problems inherent in the category of sex. But has gender-as term and as concept-created another set of problems and problematic analogies? Is it the red herring of current work in ou ... Full text Cite

The stranger at the gate: An interview

Chapter · January 1, 2016 Cite

Fabric, skin, honte-ologie

Journal Article · January 1, 2014 Full text Cite

On the right to sleep, perchance to dream

Chapter · January 1, 2014 This chapter is about insomnia in the work of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and its relationship to psychoanalysis. Levinas uses insomnia to discuss hospitality and refuge, and the chapter shows how the psychic location of space imagines refuge as death and ... Full text Cite

The lumpenproletariat, the subaltern, the mental asylum

Journal Article South Atlantic Quarterly · December 1, 2013 Khanna engages the notion of the lumpenproletariat in Frantz Fanon, tracing the concept through Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, its transformation through Fanon, and its commonality with and distinction from notions of the subaltern. She draws in particula ... Full text Cite

Rex, or the negation of wandering

Chapter · November 21, 2013 Cite

Touching, unbelonging, and the absence of affect

Journal Article Feminist Theory · August 1, 2012 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 ... Full text Cite

Racial France, or the melancholic alterity of postcolonial studies

Journal Article Public Culture · December 1, 2011 Full text Cite

Unbelonging: In motion

Journal Article Differences · August 20, 2010 Full text Cite

Hope, Demand and the Perpetual

Journal Article · 2010 Cite

Disposability

Journal Article Differences · August 18, 2009 This article discusses disposability in light of what psychoanalysis can offer to an analysis of that term, understood as a contemporary characteristic of the human and its liminal condition. The essay questions why a program of social change is demanded o ... Full text Cite

The Age of Asylum: Mona Hatoum

Journal Article · 2009 Cite

Indignity

Journal Article Positions · January 1, 2008 Full text Cite

From Rue Morgue to Rue des Iris

Journal Article Screen · December 1, 2007 Full text Cite

Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation, 1830 to the Present

Book · November 2007 Featured Publication Cite

Indignity

Journal Article Ethnic and Racial Studies · March 1, 2007 This essay, 'Indignity', argues for a radical reassessment of the category of dignity as the basis for the human or humanity. Suggesting that this Kantian notion, employed liberally in human rights work, modern constitutions, and philosophical frameworks, ... Full text Cite

Post-Palliative

Journal Article Postcolonial Text · 2006 Cite

Asylum

Journal Article Texas International Law Journal · 2006 Cite

On asylum and genealogy

Journal Article South Atlantic Quarterly · December 1, 2005 Full text Cite

Signatures of the Impossible

Journal Article Duke Journal of Law and Gender Policy · 2004 Featured Publication Cite

Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism

Book · April 2003 Featured Publication Cite

Latent Ghosts and the Manifesto

Journal Article Art History: Journal of the Association of Art Historians · April 2003 Featured Publication Cite

Baya (translation)

Journal Article Art History: Journal of the Association of Art Historians · April 2003 Cite

Le Combat de Baya (translation)

Journal Article Art History: Journal of the Association of Art Historians · April 2003 Cite

Frames, contexts, community, justice

Journal Article Diacritics · January 1, 2003 Full text Cite

Taking a stand for Afghanistan: Women and the left

Journal Article SIGNS · 2002 Featured Publication Full text Cite

The Ambiguity of Ethics: Specters of Colonialism

Journal Article · January 2001 Featured Publication Cite

Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects

Journal Article Modern Language Quarterly · December 1, 2000 Full text Cite

Cartographies of Scholarship

Journal Article Area & International Studies Curriculum: Integration Book · January 2000 Cite

From Third to Fourth Cinema

Journal Article Third Text · 1998 Featured Publication Cite

’Araby’ (Dubliners): Women’s Time and the Time of the Nation

Journal Article Joyce, Feminism, Colonialism/Postcolonialism/European Joyce Studies · 1998 Featured Publication Cite

The Construction of the Dark Continent: Agency as Autobiography

Chapter · December 1997 Featured Publication Cite