ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This seminar will explore the uncertain place of economic thought in the contemporary study of aesthetics and material culture. In the social sciences, human agency has increasingly come to be understood in terms of acts of consumption rather than acts of production or self-production. Does this suggest that philosophical conceptions of self-determination have been abandoned in favor of economic models of rationality? How do these developments alter our view of the human being as an essentially historical entity? Might the critical force of aesthetic analysis rest on its capacity to prompt a rethinking of the relationship between mental and material labor? Participants are invited to consider the ways in which literary discourses offer unique insights into the powers–and dangers–of paradigms of production, utility, or value. Do traditional distinctions between the economic and the social still prove adequate where the relationship between aesthetics and politics is concerned? To what degree has the conceptualization of signification always relied on notions of money or material exchange?

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Since Plato and Aristotle “the human” has been understood in terms of being-in-community, a being shaped by the unifying principles and techniques of shared civic and social responsibility. These principles and techniques are often assumed to be complementary: on the one hand, an often totalizing idea of community–the myths, fantasies, and ideologies which found it, and which typically assert its cohesion and communion around such markers as nation, culture, citizenship, race, ethnicity, religion, and so on–and, on the other, the particular rituals, practices, and performances enacted to sustain and reiterate this idea–rituals of eating, dancing, singing, mourning, gaming, warring, orating, poetizing, among others. However, while these practices aim to affirm the commonality or self-sameness of a community’s members, several recent theorists (Anderson, Nancy, Agamben, Butler) have suggested that the repetitive, citational form of ritual itself introduces a tension or an otherness into the communal structure, unworking the community in the very work of its perpetuation, and opening it out to broader ethical and political contexts. Further theorists (Said, Benhabib, Pratt, Laclau and Mouffe) have highlighted the oppositional practices—political action, parody, improvisation—that human “others” have turned against communities’ claims to univocity. This seminar is interested both in analyses of specific human practices and the tensions they introduce into a particular historical idea of community, and also in considerations, within particular theories of community, of the confrontations between commonality and difference, “humans” and “others.”

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The idea of comparison necessarily involves concepts of similarity and difference. Over the past 30 years, the notion of “difference” has gained considerable critical attention, from its important place within deconstruction to the more recent development of fields premised on the idea of human “difference” such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and “minority” literature. This panel welcomes historical, theoretical, philosophical and other interrogations of the category of “difference” as it relates to the “human.” How does “difference” operate within the practice of “comparison,” especially with regard to the constitution of categories that are foundational to the field, categories such as “language,” “culture,” and even the vague notion of “sensibility”? How do various categories of “difference” such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc. operate within and help to constitute the notion of the “human”? Comparative analyses of regimes of “difference” across national, temporal and geographical lines welcome.

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The idea of comparison necessarily involves concepts of similarity and difference. Over the past 30 years, the notion of “difference” has gained considerable critical attention, from its important place within deconstruction to the more recent development of fields premised on the idea of human “difference” such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and “minority” literature. This panel welcomes historical, theoretical, philosophical and other interrogations of the category of “difference” as it relates to the “human.” How does “difference” operate within the practice of “comparison,” especially with regard to the constitution of categories that are foundational to the field, categories such as “language,” “culture,” and even the vague notion of “sensibility”? How do various categories of “difference” such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc. operate within and help to constitute the notion of the “human”? Comparative analyses of regimes of “difference” across national, temporal and geographical lines welcome.

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This seminar will explore treatments of the “human” family in visual culture, e.g., theater, cinema, photography, television, performance art, painting, and other visual arts. In what ways are families portrayed as something other than human? Why is performing the drama of human families and/or the human drama of families a site of contested values? How or why is the visual mode particularly suited to the representation of the human family drama? The goal of this seminar is to compare families and their humanity (or lack thereof) from different cultural and national perspectives and across the ages, from ancient times to the present.

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Answers to questions of how technology impacts definitions of what it means to be human, what is other than human, what constitutes the good, natural and normal for human life and society, and how subjects can constitute, experience and communicate their own otherness through technology vary widely along the spectrum from humanism to posthumanism. At one end are bioconservative responses that suggest a shared and unchanging conception of human nature threatened by scientific and technological advances that alter or enhance human capabilities and functioning. At the other end are posthuman responses that use science and technology as an occasion for the kind of individuation that relativizes and resists humanism’s essentializing ethnocentrism. Papers may include: depictions of the relationship between technology, the human, and its other in literature and film; examples of historical and contemporary technologies and how they push at the boundaries of the human (cloning, prosthetic devices, gene manipulation, etc.); how and why science and technology make defining the human a pertinent concern for us today; and the possibility of a critical theory or ethics of technology based on ideas of what it means to be human vs. obligations to the other, we will address the religious, philosophical and ethical issues surrounding the use of technology to define what is human and what is other than human.

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This seminar invites reflections on literature and language reform. More specifically, we invite participants to consider how nineteenth and twentieth century nationalist and internationalist language projects at once destroyed and reconstituted —- literally re-formed —- imaginations of language as something (uniquely) human: a double movement manifest in the para-literary and masocritical activities of historical and contemporary avant-gardes, in post-structuralist translation theory, and in current models of and for world literature. Papers might address the consequences for “human language,” and the relevance for literature, of any of the following or related topics in language politics and language ecology: alphabet reform; language purification; orthographic standardization; official language policies; international auxiliary and planned languages; global languages; monolingualism and plurilingualism; machine writing and machine translation.

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From La Mettrie’s query about the human’s vegetal and mechanical tendencies (Man: A Plant / Man: A Machine) to Heidegger’s assertion (in the lectures on technology) that it belongs to the essence of man to become a tool for Being, definitions of the human have been bound up in vexed and complex ways with definitions of technics and technology. In this seminar, we propose to explore the conjunction of these definitions in literary and philosophical texts of any period or genre. We are particularly interested in submissions that conjugate theories of technics with those of literature or language. What happens when language destabilizes rather than shores up definitions of man as animal rationale? When literature is no longer a space of culture or of spirit but rather susceptible of automatization; thought from the side of the event rather than of the communication of its effects; when it becomes a grafting of living and dead, a space of hybridity or prosthesis? Who speaks or writes in this space?

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A “simple” question: In which language would universal human rights be expressed? That “non-universal” particular, the English language? By diagnosing the plight of stateless peoples and the failures of minority treaties after WWI, Hannah Arendt argued that the possibility for human rights would be inextricably linked with the sovereign power of nation-states. While the bulk of engagements with human rights have focused on the legal machinery of the modern state—the role of the decision and the exception, and the proliferation of extra-juridical territories—the function of language for materially enacting these policies has not borne the same scrutiny. Since Aristotle, sovereign powers like the nation-state have mobilized the category of the “human subject” as a being capable of language. Yet the nation-state adjudicates the limits of the human subject because people can only be recognized as human within a particular national language. A concept of universal humanity seems aporetic. This panel focuses on how language enfigures the human to provide the stable locus around which legal measures such as “rights” can be declared. For example, given the imperial and colonial legacies of the British and American empires, what hegemonic roles may “Global English” play to affect the possibilities of rights before issues of legality, “governmentality,” natural or civil rights could be claimed? What role will translation perform in articulating, defending, or foreclosing the possibility of rights? How will language mediate the emergence of extra-legal zones where some forms of life are thrown into camps? What is ‘lost’ in translation?

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In this panel we will explore human time, that is to say the anthropological or socio-psychological dimension of time, as it is expresses itself in different media such as literature, film, the visual arts, etc. Human time, as opposed to objective time (i.e., geological time or what Aristotle called in his Physics “the time of the stars”), is a development of the subjective theory of time first formulated in Augustine’s Confessions. However, “human time” is not reducible to subjectivity, but expands the horizon within which putatively “subjective” notions of time can become significant for a critique of culture. In other words, we will ask how notions of time inform our ideas about cultural artefacts (e.g. in terms of collective memory), paying particular attention to their mode of appearance (representations in and of time). This seminar thus proposes to examine various questions related to how time is an issue for and an integral part of the human being, using art “the quintessential human activity in which man reflects on himself” as a starting point. We invite papers that ask how various media constitute human temporality differently and if there are any general propositions or conclusions that can link the investigation of human time with cultural theory.

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This seminar allows for papers ranging from first contacts in the New World and elsewhere to representations in fiction and non fiction of people as being human or non-human. For instance, papers about topics like Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery through Las Casas’s defence of Natives (their genocide) to colonial and postcolonial novels, and fiction about the holocaust and the Gulag would come under this rubric as long as they addressed the issue of what is said to be human and what is not.

This seminar is sponsored by The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature.

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In Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Edward Said defines humanism as “the practice of participatory citizenship” whose “purpose is to make more things available to critical scrutiny” and thus disclose its “human misreading and misinterpretations of a collective past and present” (22). In a postcolonial and global era that bears witness to a rapid mobility of peoples, it is imperative to rethink humanism no longer as a practice that defines the human to exclude other humans but as the practice that opens to a wide gamut of political and aesthetic forms of representation of the “global hybrid” that emerges in the public realm of the global sphere. As different cultural, linguistic, social and political realities are leaking into each other and the rapid flows of capital and labor force are producing new social, economic and political conditions of co-existence, the reinvention of the public sphere and the active participation in what Etienne Balibar calls the constitution of “a citizenship-in-the-making” are more than necessary. Our seminar thus focuses on humanism as a “democratic practice” and an intellectual praxis in the context of the newly constituting and constituted postcolonial and global conditions and addresses the need to rethink the field of comparative literature as a form of humanistic practice that can contribute to the envisioning of a global community open to hybrid forms of existence and representation.

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Colonial discourses of travel and the distinction between the Human and its Others have fed off one another. Mobility as a quality of the Human and fixedness as an attribute of the Other remained central to the perpetuation of this binary and its geopolitical execution in the form of the spatial disempowerment of the Other. The flow of migration from the “South” is causing a redistribution of space and redrawing the former geographies of otherness and humanness. Lavie’s “the savage is no longer out there but has entered the home here and fissured it” echoes Ha’s “everywhere we [non-westerners] go we become someone’s private zoo” and Lazreg’s “theater of the indigenous.” These scholars emphasize the contemporary residues of the distinction between the Human and its Others. This panel will investigate the persistence and (re)deployment of this distinction in current narratives, discourses and theories of movement and intrusion into foreign spaces.

• Are Otherness and Humanness still coterminous with space and geography?
• How do migrant narratives strategically and subversively (re)deploy this distinction?
• Are there residues of this distinction in postmodern and postcolonial discourses of movement by Deleuze and Guattari, Clifford, Kaplan?
• How do humanitarianism and the distinction between the Human and its Other feed off one another? I.e., in which ways are current travels to ‘rescue’ Afghan women and other incursion into foreign territories to protect human rights (ex. the debate over “genital mutilation”) epistemologically filiated to this distinction?
• When do human rights become a humanizing mission?

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This panel invites papers from scholars considering literature by writers who define themselves as “Dalit” (untouchable caste) as well as literature concerned with the representation of untouchability. As Dalit literature has emerged in many of the languages of India (Marathi, Hindi, Tamil)as well as in English, it provides a rich site for the work of the comparatist. In addition, both writers and scholars seeking to broaden the scope of Dalit writing often bring these texts into conversation with the literature of African-Americans and that of other marginalized communities around the world. Presentations may consider some aspect of the following questions:

• What are the different ways in which the Dalit has been conceived of as subhuman? How has the trope of the animal/beast been important in this conception?
• In what way might Dalit literature be conceived of as participating in a new humanism which privileges the human experience as central and fundamental? For example, in the comparative gesture (by Dalit activists and writers as well as by scholars) that links this work with that of the Black American South, can we read a crosscultural humanism?
• What are the intellectual characteristics demanded of the Dalit/Dalit writing to be considered ‘human’, particularly in relation to Mandal commission politics, and/or in relation to the aesthetics privileged by mainstream literature?
• The theme of ‘humanizing’ the subject through literacy and education appears often in Dalit narratives. How does Dalit literature address this thematic frame?
• How does geographical space play a role in this humanizing mission?

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“Spirits”: ghosts, faeries, demons, and their teeming brethren have never quite made the transition to humanity, yet writers from all epochs have attempted to “embody” them in literature and explain their interactions with humankind. This panel solicits papers that discuss the peculiar magic inherent in attempting to define spiritual beings in anthropomorphic ways, chronicle contact between the human and spirit realms, or describe the paranormal in earthly terminology. Questions to explore: How do spiritual beings “translate” from older genres like the folktale and epic to more modern genres/audiences? From animistic cultures to non-animistic ones? Have spirits become an obsolete or irrelevant in postmodern writing? How have they evolved, faded, or transmogrified?; How do “culturally specific” spirits (e.g. ban sidhe, Dryads, animal spirits, rada and petro of Vodun, gandharvas of Sanskrit poetry, La Llorona, hathors of ancient Egypt) transmit the beliefs, memories, and Weltanschauung of the cultures to which they pertain? How do they function when transplanted to other cultural audiences through the medium of texts?; How do Eurocentric and Native American spirit mythologies impact Native/American literature?; Are there such things as “spirit imperialism”–texts in which the spirits of a colonized people are supplanted (linguistically or otherwise) by those of their conquerors, or texts in which spirits act as symbols of conquest/possession?; How do spirits support, resist, or redefine literary definitions of femininity and masculinity? How do they relate to earthly geographies and chronologies? How do they participate in what Harold Bloom has called “the invention of the human?”

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Hypertext literacy is a literacy made up of new and technologically altered kinds of access. Publishing on the web has made the virtual printed word the creation of not just the select and selected few: anyone now can easily publish a web site that reproduces the form of established publications, whether journalistic or academic, while the content can bear little to no resemblance to the kinds of publications that trained the web-writer’s eye. The web also produces its own forms of public writing, like blogs, where authority is conferred not by resemblances but connections. Being hypertext-literate would perhaps better be described as being ‘fluent’: not simply knowing the markers of what constitutes literacy but partaking of a flow of writing in which meanings and connotations take unexpected turns that escape their writers’ control. This seminar will explore how this new form of literacy influences and alters our encounters with textuality: for the readers, creators, performers, students and teachers of texts. The papers in this seminar look at how this medium escapes or reinforces existing cultural hegemonies, and affects our creative and pedagogical practices as we attempt to transmit not static bodies of knowledge but the experience of being fluently literate.

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