ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Of late the human—so long the rational, articulate, adult, male, dominant foil to the irrational, the inarticulate, the child, the female, the dominated or minoritized—has struggled to free itself from its persistent definition in terms of binary opposition to various earthly Others. Yet interrogations of the human by phenomenologists, poststructuralists, and postcolonial theorists often remain mired in the very Self/Other dichotomy that haunts the category’s construction. This seminar reconsiders the construction of the “human” through the prisms of “alternative humanities”: the blind spots of so-called “non-humanity” in which humanity and human community are refigured and often productively reimagined. What kind of subject survives in zones of exclusion—or refuge—from the states of cognition, language, gender, age, class, race, ethnicity, and religion that the “human” historically has privileged? To what extent do feminist, postcolonial, and globalization theories challenge or subvert dominant conceptions of the “human,” and to what extent might they problematically uphold them? What happens when human identity (imagined either as unity or as singularity) is forged from human difference—when an Other is incorporated into, translated into, or purged from a Self? What happens when the “non-human” chooses to dwell beyond the boundaries of relation to the self-described “human” and so shatters the binary principle on which the distinction between the human and the non-human rests? Presentations in this seminar will engage such questions through both close readings of texts and contexts and metacritical reappraisals of philosophy and theory.

Friday, March 24

Isabella Winkler, Antioch College
“Age of Consent”
Susan Shin Hee Park, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
“The Endeavor to Persevere: Monstrous Femininity and Spinoza’s Conception of Conatus in the Artwork of Jo Spence”
Thomas B. Kuplic, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Figural Crisis: Difference and Community”
Anne Jamison, University of Utah
“Of Mice and Music”

Saturday, March 25

Markéta Olehlová, Charles University, Prague
“‘WE’ and ‘THEY’: Lévinas’s Same and the Other and Their Further Reflections in Post-Colonial Theory”
Shaden M. Tageldin, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
“Part of Europe? Translation and the Disavowal of Difference in an Egypt between Empires”
Z. Esra Mirze, University of Tampa
“Layers of Othering in Fatih Akin’s Head-On”
Megan K. Ahern, University of Connecticut, Storrs
“Unity With(out) the Other: Contrasting Approaches to Difference and Humanity by Thomas Mann and Girish Karnad”