ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar seeks to explore how works of Science Fiction conceptualize and imagine beings from planets or places other than Earth. How is the completely alien imagined? To what extent do these conceptualizations repeat, mimic, or differ from narratives of inter-human contact as found in travel narratives and histories? How do they reflect, explore, or diverge from current theories of identity, borders, hybridity, gender, contact zones, diaspora, globalization, travel, etc.…? Can examining the completely fictional other world alien contribute to our investigations of actual and fictional inter-human encounters and interactions?

Friday, March 24

Deborah Bailin, University of Maryland, College Park
“Apes, Aliens, and the End of Humanity: Evolution and Otherness in Post-Apocalyptic Fictions by Bernard Malamud and Ocatavia Butler”
Ronald Bogue, University of Georgia
“Becoming Other, Becoming Human: Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy”
Ria Cheyne, Royal Holloway, University of London
“Absence and the Alien: Conceptualizing the Alien Other in Science Fiction”
Betsy Huang, Clark University
“Contacts and Contracts: Octavia E. Butler’s and Orson Scott Card’s (Post)Humanist Visions”

Saturday, March 25

David Wheat, Truman State University
“The Alien Enemy Within”
Yu-I Hsieh, Rutgers University
“Interfacing Humanity: The Example of Ghost in the Shell”
Lydia Fecteau, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey
“The Disabled Body as Mutant and Alien”
Liesl Owens, Rutgers University
“Response to ‘Alien Worlds’”