ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Postcolonial theory has frequently asserted the value of positionality in order to foreground the politics of discursive authority. Positionality has generally been thought to include race, gender, sexuality, and class but has more recently come to include geographical and biotic space. In an era of increasing ecological degradation, the mutually constitutive relationship between social inequity and environmental problems has been more starkly illuminated, as the recent tragedy in New Orleans has shown. In an effort to understand how the history of empire has altered both the literal and literary landscape of postcolonial studies, we seek papers that explore these points of contact. This panel engages the connections between postcolonialism and ecocriticism in historical terms as well as their contemporary manifestations in areas of the world that remain particularly vulnerable to environmental crisis, (neo)colonialism, and globalization. Papers will address these, among other questions: Are postcolonial and environmental concerns compatible? What emergent theoretical paradigms are needed to address both fields? How do postcolonial authors imagine and theorize the relationship between human and non-human histories? What is the relationship between ecological imperialism and literature? Why has ecocriticism neglected the (racialized) history of empire, and what might it gain from a thorough engagement with postcolonial studies? How might these knowledges be drawn upon to guide the futures of sovereignty and sustainability?

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Generally, this panel seeks to explore the relations between the human or the post-human subject and its ecologies. The panel seeks contributions from humanists and post-humanists on the ecological, ethical, political, social, and/or economic consequences of such conceptions as “the human,” “nature,” and their variants. One of the goals of the panel will be to debate the extent to which such conceptions themselves already form an or multiple ecology/ies; that is to say, the extent to which they already demarcate and/or engender territories of “real” ecological consequence. Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

• How do race, gender, and sexuality shape the ecologies of the (post)human?
• Where do (post)human ecologies end?
• How are ecologies shaped by representations?
• How are representations shaped by ecologies?
• What kinds of ecologies are there? Are there sound ecologies, cinematic ecologies, etc.?
• Where is the ecology of the (post)human to be situated?
• What are the ecologies of empire?
• Are ecologies real? What ecologies?
• Are there significant differences between human and post-human ecologies?
• What do ecologies exclude as part of their self-formation?

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Since its inception in the late sixteenth century, the essay has existed in the space between fiction and fact, between art and science, between the discourses of the human and those of the nonhuman world. Its occupation of this liminal space positions the essay both as a site of the investigation of the human and its others as well as a means for that investigation. The papers in this seminar interrogate the essay in terms of the modes of subjectivity it occasions and in terms of the discursive properties of essayism which orient it for an understanding of the human and its others.

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Many twenty-first century European Institutions and individuals deploy symbols of the past to represent themselves in the present. In order to portray Europeans, for example, as democratic successors of the Greek City-States, descendants of the open-minded Renaissance man, or defenders of the Declaration of Human Rights, European Community officials use symbols to represent these values and explicitly or not to exclude others. So as to construct a new transnational identity, the European Union has an anthem and a flag, as well as joint cultural and economic ventures, such as the Erasmus Program and the Airbus industry. The proposed conference panel examines how European and diasporic artists, writers, journalists, filmmakers, and singers use and interpret these and similar symbols of European unity. Some, certainly, may embrace them; others may interrogate or even subvert them, revealing inherent contradictions in the construction of a new European identity. Panelists themselves will stake out different positions on the general topic and discuss a wide range of source materials from or about the European Union’s member states (or candidates for membership). Basing their inquiry on concepts of national identity formation (such as Anderson’s “imagined communities”, Hobsbahm’s “invention of tradition”, Nora’s “lieux de mémoire”, Habermas’ “concepts of New Public Sphere”, Balibar’s “Marxian” analyses of “Europeanness”), and other analytical tools, panelists will examine European fictions (novels, theatre, films) and essays produced in the national and regional languages and cultures of Europe to better understand how an imagined community in the making defines itself and its Others.

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The goal of this seminar is to reflect upon the dehumanizing and uprooting capacity of language through the concept of “exapropriation”, a term coined by Derrida in his later works. The term exapropriation, when applied to language, expresses the double move of how language puts the human in place (hands it the qualities that are proper to it, appropriation) and at the same time dehumanizes (pulls the human out of its proper place, expropriation). We will focus on the imminent convergence of the tele-technological and the (post)colonial uprooting of place and the human as witnessed in contemporary globalization. On the one hand we will define exapropriation in relation to literature and the tele-technologies that uproot and exapropriate language and place itself (telephone, television, e-mail). This is a path that is explored by Derrida himself when he characterizes these technologies as “machines that introduce ubiquitous disruption, and the rootlessness of place, the dislocation of the house, the infraction into the home.” (Derrida 2002: 91) In this case, we encourage proposals for papers that address the intertwining of language, technology, and the inhuman in contemporary literature. On the other hand, we encourage the submission of papers that utilize “exapropriation” as a concept for the analysis of postcolonial literature and its uprooting instances of dehumanization.

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Studies of exile that focus on homelessness as the impetus for the émigré’s scholarship neglect two key aspects. First, this tendency has resulted in overlooking the significance of what Bruce Robbins calls the “situatedness-in-displacement.” Secondly, the interest in the epistemological value of exile has foregrounded its value for Western scholarship and neglected the bearing of émigrés in the non-Western world. In an effort to reevaluate the link between exile, Otherness, and critical consciousness in view of these considerations, this seminar seeks to examine the ways in which intellectual emigrants engage with their new surroundings. The first panel critically re-examines the question of exile vis-à-vis Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer and their crucial role in the formation of Comparative Literature. The second panel raises questions concerning exile, language, and memory with regards to Rifa’al-Tahtawi, Eva Hoffman, Adam Zagajewski and Salman Rushdie.

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