ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will focus on the actual act of defining “the human” in opposition to the deemed “other.” This act anthropomorphizes the world both through its acceptance and its rejection (you are human, you are not human); it shapes the way we view ourselves and the rest of the world. Exploring this act of “defining-through-opposition/the other” in terms of what has been deemed “non-human,” directly puts into question the very structures that hold the concept of “the human” in place. In the end, it can potentially be seen as an act of oppression, particularly through its rigidity and its way of masking itself as “truth.” The interest here lies in the actual consequences of this discourse and, more importantly, the consequences that befall the “others.” In other words: how do these definitions affect the ways in which we treat ourselves and the (so-called) outside? In this seminar, I would like to emphasize the anthropomorphizing of the so-called “rejects” of the world: womyn, “minorities,” animals and nature (through this rejection “methodology”). Some possible topics can therefore be, but are not limited to:

• oppression of animals, womyn, and/or nature through their position as “other”
• the place of the human (or hu-man) within an ecofeminist approach
• the position of the so-called “natural” within the definition of “the human”
• identity and categorization/anthropomorphization
• definitions and oppression
• definitions as an act
• the role of comparative literary theories in the act of defining

Friday, March 24

Dimitrios Kargiotis, Université Marc Bloch (Strasbourg II), France
“Notes towards a Critique of Biographical Reason”
Mari Ruti, University of Toronto
“Becoming a Person: Being Human in a Posthuman World”
Marie Barchant, Rutgers University
“Translating the Body in Violent Tongues”
Suzanne Rintoul, McMaster University
“Domestic Violence and the Other Woman’s Body in Wilkie Collins’s ‘Man and Wife’”

Saturday, March 25

Ophelia Selam, Binghamton University
“To kill two birds with one stone”: oppressive definitions, oppressive discourse.
Alexis Harley, University of Sydney
“The Ant People, anxiety and alienation”
Aaron Shackelford, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill “Anthropomorphism as Knowledge in Emily Dickinson”

Sunday, March 26

Kam-ming Wong, University of Georgia
“How Radical Can the Other Be?: Attuning the “Butterfly Dream” with Confucian Humanism”
Khadidiatou Gueye, Pennsylvania State University
“Herspace: Liminal Peformance of the Mulatta in Bessie Head’s ‘A Question of Power’ and Nella Larsen’s ‘Passing’”
Katie Williams, Indiana University
“Haunting Images: Understanding PETA’s ‘Holocaust on Your Plate’ Campaign”