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 all are 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 the 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.