Dr Asha Varadharajan

Nominated Fellow

Dr Asha Varadharajan (Queen's University, Canada)

Nominated Fellow, November 2022 - August 2023 (previously IASH-SSPS Visiting Research Fellow January - December 2019)

https://www.queensu.ca/english/people/asha-varadharajan

Asha Varadharajan is Associate Professor of English at Queen's University, Canada.  She is the author of Exotic Parodies: Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak. Her current research reconceptualizes the category of the refugee and the meaning of displacement. Her most recent publications comment on the crisis of the humanities, the subaltern in contemporaneity, violence against women and the discourse of human rights, decolonizing pedagogy, postcolonial temporalities, humanitarian intervention, and the legacy of The Frankfurt School. The most fun she has had writing was while composing her chapter on Eric Idle for the Dictionary of Literary BiographyThe most chuffed she has been lately was when she received the Queen's University 2021 Principal's Promoting Student Inquiry Teaching Award.

Project Title: “How to Kick Ass When Life’s a Bitch”: The Story of (Non)Human Rights / Archaeologies of Nonentity: The New Realities of Forced Migration and Involuntary Displacement

During her residence at IASH, Asha Varadharajan hopes to complete two book manuscripts provisionally entitled “How to Kick Ass When Life’s a Bitch”: The Story of (Non)Human Rights and Archaeologies of Nonentity: The New Realities of Forced Migration and Involuntary Displacement respectively. She conceives of both books as interventions, interruptions, disruptions, and reconstellations designed to challenge critical consensus or address critical lacunae that emerge in cross-disciplinary scholarship on these fields. The book on human rights, for example, challenges Joseph Slaughter’s influential account of the Bildungsroman as underwriting the discourse of human rights in the context of violence against women, rewrites Canada’s vaunted record of humanitarian intervention, exposes the contemporary heirs of the Frankfurt School’s indifference to cultural difference in their engagement with human rights, and contends with the fraught and under-elaborated relations between needs and rights in the context of theorizations of hostipitality (Jacques Derrida’s coinage). 3 additional chapters address the Frankfurt School’s investment in universal history at the expense of the trajectory of caste-inflected struggle, the second looks at the discourse of corporate social responsibility and the nefarious history of the politics of development, and the third reflects on consciousness, language, love, and the law to reverse the prevailing focus on becoming-animal in favour of becoming-human. Archaeologies of Nonentity has, thus far, a chapter that questions the received wisdom on trauma as unspeakable and unclaimable, one that evolves the concept of denizen as an antidote to the seemingly ontological desire to belong on the part of the displaced, and one that explores the role of visual affect in reconstituting the relation between stranger and kin.

Varadharajan also has several research collaborations in the works with scholars, journalists, authors, and artists in the UK and Europe to respond to the emerging tussle between the legal and normative definition of the refugee and migrants variously stranded by scarcity, climate change, and the shaping of global disparity by colonization, development, and debt. The subjects of their inquiry include Afghan interpreters, brokers, and mediators in UK military interventions, tales of African migrations that escape the notice of mainstream advocacy and hostility, portraits of female survivors of sexual violence residing in refugee camps, the relations between cultural ecology and political economy in documentary cinema, and the shapeshifting of Islam in/and Europe. Varadharajan and her collaborators believe action on a smaller scale might create hope for the few even if it may not dispel fear for the many.

 

Previous Project (2019): Rights on the Move: Identity, Habitation and Affect in “Refugeedom”
UN refugee policy arguably hurts as much as it helps.  Its distinction between secure citizens and hapless refugees ignores precarious lives within the "refuge" of the State.  I address the overlaps rather than only the differences between safe and perilous migration to explore alternate modes of dwelling and habitation.