ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will consider the changing roles of nonhuman animals as laborers, companions, commodities, and cultural figures in current processes of globalization. Animals and products produced from and by animal bodies are increasingly circulated by transnational production networks, impacting practices of human nutrition, scientific experimentation, agriculture, industrial production, and animal domestication worldwide. As globalization transforms the lived spaces of human and nonhuman life, animals have come to serve as powerful symbols in the transnational politics of culture: companion animals, laboring animals, and hunted animals are used to depict the cosmopolitanism and inequalities (economic, racial, etc.) enabled by the globalization of labor, information, and commerce. We will explore how highlighting animals in the global scene may help us rethink issues of nationalism, identity, and empire.

Friday, March 24

Emily Wittman, Villanova University
“Four-Legged Resistance: Hemingway and Greene in Africa”
Scott Boehm, University of California, San Diego
“Teddy Roosevelt Redux: International Big Game Hunting and the Remaking of Imperial Masculinity”
Pattrice Jones, University of Maryland, Eastern Shore
“Endangered Turtles and Avenging Chickens: Animals as Dead Metaphors in the Context of Globalization”
Brett Mizelle, California State University, Long Beach
“Porcine Planet: Pigs, Globalization and Animal Studies “

Saturday, March 25

Govindasamy Agoramoorthy, Tajen University
“Use of monkeys and apes in entertainment in Southeast Asia”
Deepti Sastry, University of London
“The mediated space of the Delhi Zoo: Nationalism and Animals”
Neel Ahuja, University of California, San Diego
“ ‘Simian Sovereignty’ and the Molecular Construction of the Body in Global Rights Discourse”
William Halloran, Indiana University
“Tissue Made Text: Future Mouse and the Global Moment of Genetic Mapping in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth”