ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has written that “I have indeed thought of who will have come after the subject, if we set to work, in the name of who came before, so to speak. Here is the simple answer: …the Aboriginal” (A Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 27). This remark occurs in a discussion of the eighteenth century debate about whether aboriginal peoples were human or not. The human and/or its other? Our session presents a series of critical analyses of figurations of aboriginality as the other, the edge, the before or the after of the human. Friday’s session includes papers on the Americas, while Saturday’s session looks at examples from India and Australia.

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The question as to how literature, along with other creative arts, both helps to determine and is determined by the human is at the forefront of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century aestheticism in Europe and the Americas. Art for art’s sake–both as an approach toward art and as an attitude toward life–promotes freedom and autonomy, aims for newness and originality, hails pleasure over instruction, and prefers form and beauty to content and truth. As such, aestheticism invites us to consider the relationship between art and life, between the aesthetic and the social, especially in light of its purported severance between these two spheres. By widening the distance between art and life, separating aesthetics from the economic, scientific, pragmatic, and political, and trying to avoid the fate of “art for capital’s sake” or “art for the market’s sake,” l’art pour l’art critiques the dominant social and economic values that made such a redefinition of art necessary in the first place. This seminar thus aims to explore the extent to which art for art’s sake can viewed as an attempt to rehumanize (rather than dehumanize) art, the artist, or the artistic receptor in ways that speak to the question of what makes us human. Seminar participants should thus discuss how the aestheticist view of art and literature is either life-sustaining or life-evading? Both theoretical analyses and textual comparisons are welcome.

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The papers gathered in this seminar explore various aspects of sexual representation and, in particular, of the permeability between gender boundaries, either in the name of aesthetics (Pei-jing Li and Maria Euchner) or politics (Erin Schlumpf and Louisa Matmati). The participants in this seminar raise in novel fashion issues about gender, moral aesthetics, and political identity in transcultural communities.

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Arguing for its relevance today, Edward Said asserts that humanism is not an exclusionary stance that reaffirms our certainty in the canon, but rather “a process of unending disclosure, discovery, self-criticism, and liberation.” This seminar will test this understanding against our classroom experience and current transformations of the American and European academy. How do we encourage genuine intellectual exploration in so-called skills courses? How do we invite our students to say interesting things about literary texts? How can linguistic difficulty be a source of interpretive power? How do we confront the corporate turn in higher education? When the humanities are no longer seen as critical, like the sciences and technical fields, what is their future?

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This seminar discusses forms of “the human” that do not rest on the too-simple binaries like “human”/“other” or “human”/“non-/post-/in-human” privileged by many of today’s scholars whose work references Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Such too-simple differences reify concepts of the subject, identity, and agency to privilege Western images of individuality, naturalizing a humanist fallacy and privileging the victim/perpetrator dialectic. The first set of papers in this seminar pose theoretical challenges to the politics of the personal and contemporary concepts of the human. The second set addresses these paradigms through example, using literary and cultural texts to stage different kinds of theoretical challenges. Together, these discussions question “the human” as a necessary reference point for critics, interrogating how it reifies specific epistemologies and occludes alternate theorizations of the epistemological and real politics inherent in the post-industrial, globalized world of information societies.

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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?

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Beginning with the epistolary texts that document the transatlantic voyages of Christopher Columbus, America, the quarta pars orbis, was viewed as a repository for European fantasy. Amazons, mermaids, the lost continent of Atlantis and other beings and places inherited from the Greco Latin tradition, but never precisely located on their maps, were simultaneously juxtaposed with biblical history and topography, such as the Seven Tribes of Israel, the Earthly Paradise –itself born from the classical trope of locus amoenus— and the evangelical wanderings of the Apostle Saint Thomas. In this panel we will consider the development of the hybrid palimpsest that is reflected in what Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman has called the “invention of America.” This will be accomplished through a consideration and analysis of the “indigenous factor,” in which incomprehension and misunderstanding led to the re-fashioning of American civilizations from New Spain to New Castile and which began both textually and iconographically in the former centers of pre-Hispanic culture and later colonial capitals: Cuzco and Tenochtitlan. Needless to say, this topic is not limited to the colonial period, as many Latin American authors –particularly those of the “Nueva literatura latinoamericana” and the “Boom,”—have revived these visions born of misapprehension while at the same time laying the foundations of an original American literature that is at once local and universal, past and present.

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What is the function of the animal in a post-human world? From Donna Haraway’s Companion Species Manifesto to Steve Baker’s discussion of contemporary animal art in The Post-Modern Animal, to the philosophical ponderings on man and animal by Derrida and Agamben, the question of the animal has been foregrounded as a theoretical question for our times. In the aftermath of what has been seen as a crisis in humanism and the insufficiency, if not impossibility of the human as promoted by the humanist enterprise, the arts and humanities have made a turn to the animal as a means of both exposing and shoring up human deficiencies—especially the deficiencies of our language and our ways of knowing. The term, “the animal,” Derrida reminds us, is itself a construct of a humanist world that posed this impossible, singular identity to oppose and define the identity of the human. Humanism, as Agamben also reminds us, judged itself and its progress in terms of a mastery over the animal and the distance the human traveled from an animal state. Are these claims justified and sufficient? This panel will consider both the status of the animal for humanism and the animals (or Derrida’s “animot”) that might replace the construct of the animal in a post-human world.

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Animal Others play a major role in defining ideas of the human in literature, the visual arts, and culture from prehistoric times to the present. The panel will present broad cultural and theoretical perspectives on this issue as well as specific examples from a number of historical periods, cultural regions, genres, and media.

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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.

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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.

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How can an anthropological approach to cultural artifacts better enable us to perceive the fundamental structures and mechanisms that underlie social practices? To what extent are primitive or archaic rituals still present in modern or “advanced” cultures? Does the field of “cultural studies” as it is currently constituted presuppose an anthropological dimension (i.e., ethnography etc.)? It is often said that the primary purpose of literature or art is to represent the “human condition.” What does this mean, anthropologically speaking? How can a generative analysis of culture yield insights into the function of religion, art and politics in today’s world? This interdisciplinary seminar will attempt to address and debate these types of questions. Any contributions that either use or dialogue with an anthropological approach to literary or cultural studies are welcome. Those who draw on philosophical or psychological perspectives are also encouraged to submit papers.

Seminar sponsored by the e-journal Anthropoetics.

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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

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As a continuation from the 2005 ACLA meeting, this panel invites papers focusing on the Asian Diaspora, which challenges and resists political, ideological, cultural, and national boundaries. The physical mobility of diasporic people, either self-motivated or forced upon them by varied social and historical factors, creates spaces where ideas are exchanged, cultivated, and nourished, through these dynamic movements.
Possible topics of papers include:

• (post-and neo-)colonial landscapes
• choice of languages and textual experiments
• transnationality and identities
• intersections of gender, ethnicity, class and diaspora
• challenge to the notions of nation states, and homogeneity
• (counter-)memories and national history

Although focusing on the contemporary Asian diasporic literature, the seminar aims to discuss every (possible) dimension of Asian transnational writers throughout the world, including those living in the Americas, Asia, and Africa.

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This seminar will explore the transformations of the human body imagined by the various avant-gardes during the first decades of the twentieth century. This was a period in which the celebration of technology transformed our understanding of the human: the typewriter transformed women into writing machines; radio stripped listeners of all senses except hearing and electrified our ears; the camera became a prosthetic eye through which the modern world could be seen in a radically new light; modern architecture introduced new possibilities of moving through space. In short, modernity turned human bodies into technologically-determined androids: all senses were now mechanized and the modern world was perceived through a series of equally modern prosthetic devices.
This seminar welcomes paper proposals examining the various androids imagined by the avant-gardes: from the surrealist plot to transform authors into automatic writing machines to the futurist design to accelerate human movement and turn poets into racecars. How were mechanical inventions recorded on the human body? What effects did radio, film, the gramophone, dictaphones, cameras, automobiles and airplanes have on authors? How were these transformations perceived by various avant-garde groups around the world?

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