ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The debate sparked by PETA’s animal “liberation” campaign entitled, “Are Animals the New Slaves?”–which has drawn criticism for comparing the institutional mistreatment of animals to the enslavement of African Americans–illustrates the complex racial dynamics of humanist discourse in American culture. Tim Wise’s Counterpunch article, “Animal Whites,” postulates that PETA’s “blindingly white” and wealthy membership explains its inability to comprehend the dangers of destabilizing the human/animal divide. Yet modern western textual instantiations of that divide historically have been raced, basing the coherence of (white) human identity on the abjection of the (black) other, positioning “negritude” at the limits, as Warren Montag has argued, as “the site of an oscillation between the human and the nonhuman.” This seminar seeks to interrogate the role of racialized discourse, particularly white supremacy, in literary, philosophical, scientific, and political narratives engaging the division between humans and animals, and in the interrelated cultural project of constituting the modern human subject. The focus is literary and cultural productions of the Americas and the Black/Green Atlantic from the sixteenth-century into the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on texts that negotiate racialized disciplinary regimes, including “New World” slavery, civil rights, institutional violence, public education, criminal justice, military training, and religious teaching. The seminar will also pay close attention to issues of gender, sexuality, age, ability, and socio-economic status as they complicate the racialized production of the human subject. Discussion will address how a discourse of the human can challenge the racism on which it is grounded.

Friday, March 24

Lucia Hodgson, University of Southern California
“‘The Voice of the Dumb’: Thomas Tryon’s Anti-Imperialist Talking Animals and New World Slavery”
Colleen Boggs, Dartmouth College
“White Exceptionalism and the Animalized Slave”
Ruth Blandón, University of Southern California
“The Social Construction of the Human in U.S. Law and Geopolitics”

Saturday, March 25

Sarah Amato, University of Toronto
“The White Elephant in London”
Noah Cincinnati, The Johns Hopkins University
“The White Man’s Other Burden: Revisiting Race and Empire at the Bronx Zoo, 1896-1913”
Sandra Swart, University of Stellenbosch
“‘Race’ Horses: Equine Discourse and Social Dynamics under Apartheid and in the New South Africa”
Jae-uk Choo, Indiana University of Pennsylvania
“Political Implications of Becoming Animal in Kingston’s Novels”