ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written that “I have indeed thought of who will have come after the subject, if we set to work, in the name of who came before, so to speak. Here is the simple answer: …the Aboriginal” (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 27). This remark occurs in a discussion of the eighteenth century debate about whether aboriginal peoples were human or not. The human and/or its other? Our session presents a series of critical analyses of figurations of aboriginality as the other, the edge, the before or the after of the human. Friday’s session includes papers on the Americas, while Saturday’s session looks at examples from India and Australia.

Friday, March 24

Rob Appleford, University of Alberta
“Jimmie Durham’s Third Text of Refusal, or the Heavy Dude”
Monika Wadman, Syracuse University
“Repugnant Aboriginality: LeAnne Howe’s The Shell Shaker and the Predicament of Indigenous Self-representation in the Age of Multiculturalism”
Theodore Van Alst, University of Connecticut
“The Alchemy of Avarice: Antiquarian Others, El Libro de las Profecías and the American Holocaust”
Christopher Bracken, University of Alberta
“‘In this Separation’: The Correspondence of Joseph Johnson”

Saturday, March 25

Ben Conisbee Baer, Princeton University
“The Story of an Unbodied Terror”
Andrew McCann, Dartmouth College
“Henry Kendall’s ‘Aboriginal Man’: Autochthony and Extinction in the Settler-Colony”
Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Columbia University
“Bones Were Everywhere: Moving Indigenous Narrative across the Exclusions of Reason”