Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism Revisited. Ranjana Khanna with Anshu Srivastava (respondent)

This is the latest in a series of seminars on Decolonising Psychoanalysis, organised by the Race and Culture Committee of the Guild of Psychotherapists. The series is intended to open up conversations about psychoanalysis by initiating Transatlantic Dialogues between academics and psychotherapists, bringing clinical responses to their academic decolonial work.

Members of the Guild are invited to use the promotional code MEMBER for a 25% discount. Students are invited to use the promotional code STUDENT for a 50% discount.

Abstract - Ranjana Khanna

In this seminar, Ranjana Khanna reconsiders some of the theories and observations of her path-breaking book Dark Continents: Psychoanalysis and Colonialism (2003), and we will discuss the clinical and social implications of these still-relevant ideas. She will consider the demands made on psychoanalysis from the outside and from within psychoanalytic theory.

Ranjana Khanna's work is wide-ranging and engages in particular questions of sexual difference and colonial legacies, looking to conceptualise a psychoanalysis which is genuinely 'postcolonial' and emancipatory. Her book Dark Continents (2003) was one of the first to investigate comprehensively the influence of colonialism and racialisation on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis and related therapies. How do these ideas strike us today, when we consider ourselves more conversant with the issues raised by post-colonial thinking? More broadly, can they help psychoanalysis and other talking therapies embody an anti-racist approach in their clinical practice and theorising?

Speakers’ Biographies

Ranjana Khanna is Professor of English, Women's Studies, and the Literature Program at Duke University, USA. 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. She is the author of 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 published in journals like Differences, Signs, Third Text, Diacritics, Screen, Art History, Positions, SAQ, Feminist Theory, and Public Culture. Her current book manuscripts in progress are called: Asylum: The Concept and the Practice and Technologies of Unbelonging.

Anshu Srivastava is a training member of The Guild of Psychotherapists, London, and holds an MA in Psychoanalytic Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His work as a training psychoanalytic therapist includes seeing people privately, at the Guild of Psychotherapists reduced-fee clinic and as a student counsellor at London Business School. He has worked as an honorary psychotherapist within NHS Forensic Psychiatry Services and continues to work with young people in the community, through a charity project called The Advocacy Academy, based in South London.

As an active member of the Race & Culture Committee at the Guild, Anshu is current editor and presenter of the Committee’s podcast series and co-organiser of the 2022 seminar programme, ‘Decolonising Psychoanalysis – Transatlantic Dialogues’.
Anshu has also been a practising architect for over 25 years, founding and running an international creative studio with offices in London and Paris.

Image: Kara Walker Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred b'tween the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994)
Credit: Mark Alexander/Sikkema Jenkins & Co/Joshua White