While melancholia is more often than not considered to be a disabling affect, Khanna’s paper will show how it implicitly provides an ethico-political gesture toward the future. And this is particularly the case in studies of colonial and postcolonial subjectivities. Her paper will argue against the sharp division between the realms of the ethical and the political, between aesthetics and politics, and between melancholia and utopia in the theoretical humanities.
In her book Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism, Khanna argues that melancholia emerges from coloniality in a manner that allows for critique. Indeed the critical agency proposed by Freud as being endemic to melancholia provides an interesting counter to the hegemonic super-ego in which critical agency is assimilated into social mechanisms of control. Unlike arguments concerning melancholic affectation, described in Wolf Lepenies, Walter Benjamin, and Wendy Brown as something disabling in terms of imagining a politically different future, she will suggest that the affect of melancholia, as theorized by Freud, and by Abraham and Torok, point the way toward a political future free of the failures of postcolonial states and misguided biopolitics. Profoundly influenced by deconstructive marxism, feminism and postcolonial thought, from Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, and Jacqueline Rose, her paper will propose a future for postcolonial reading accountable to a form of marxist feminist internationalism. The rejection of postcolonial theory seems to be endemic to the field. Khanna will argue that the specter of the postcolonial subaltern, like the specter of Marx, demand a form of internationalism quite distinct from its past failures recently described by Robert Young. These melancholic specters, available to us only through listening to the often unspoken demands of a text, point the way toward a different future, and are profoundly material.
Recent work of transnational feminism, often conducted under the rubric of women’s studies, postcolonial studies, and newly reconfigured Area Studies, often fails to theorize adequately the important role of marxist feminism in the future of critical thinking and responsible scholarship. Marxist feminism’s early theorization of affective labor (more recently taken up by Hardt and Negri) point toward the importance of women’s labor often also excluded from theories of globalization, or otherwise reified imperiously in development studies.
The paper will take the form of a reading of texts on melancholia, utopia, and postcoloniality, and of a manifesto for future field formation, politics, and reading practices. While the paper will propose no particular attachment to the term “postcolonial” if it does seem to have run its course, it will highlight the very important work conducted under that rubric, including the critique of postcolonial reason itself. It will also insist upon the importance of older forms of colonialism in our understanding of late capitalist globalization.
Ranjana Khanna received her Ph.D. in Women’s Studies at the University of York, U.K., in 1993. She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, the Program in Literature, and Women’s Studies at Duke University. She teaches and researches in the areas of psychoanalytic, postcolonial and feminist theory and literature (and in various combinations of these). Her publications include Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). She is currently completing a book manuscript on transnational feminism provisionally titled “Algeria Cuts: Women and Representation 1830 to the Present.” She has published on a variety of subjects ranging from postcoloniality, feminism, film, autobiography, new configurations of Area Studies in the post-Cold War era, torture and terrorism, and psychoanalysis.
This event is free and open to the public. Registration is not required, but seating is limited. Parking is available for $7.00 on the UCLA campus. Please go to the Parking Information kiosk at the intersection of Hilgard and Westholme Avenues for the nearest available lot.
