ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

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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The digital is perhaps the defining “other” of the human body in the late 20th century. We invite papers and/or performances that seek to investigate the informatic relationship between the animal and the machine, as Norbert Wiener phrased it in the subtitle of his Cybernetics. The relation of the carnal to the mathematical, or physical to digital, is a pressing contemporary concern for artists, theorists and writers. We would like to frame this question quite broadly as possible, in historical terms, inviting scholars specializing in all periods and areas up to the present, from the Baroque, the 19th Century and the early 20th to to the present. Our aim is to consider the relation of physicality and digitality, with a cast of conceptual personae that will include thinking machines, automata, robots, cyborgs, posthumans, and other hybrid monsters.

This seminar is organized in collaboration with the journal Issues in Contemporary Culture and Aesthetics.

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A phenomenon in the Renaissance that proliferated Europe throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, the cabinet of curiosities was in essence a personal collection of rare, unknown and marvelous objects. Popular, visual and encyclopedic in their approach, these cabinets, or Wunderkammern, included a diversity of specimens from both known and newly discovered worlds–from unicorn tails to monkey teeth, Indian canoes to phosphorescent minerals, carrots to pinned insects. These collections of curious objects that are seemingly not human in nature require the idea or application of human characteristics and traits to describe their inhuman state. In this act of collecting, categorizing, displaying and recording, the idea of a Natural Order and what it meant to be human were thrown into question by philosophers, scientists, theologians, and poets alike. Taking a broad view of this cabinet of curiosities, the seminar’s aim is: 1) to investigate the varied, changing, and possible forms of the cabinet itself (e.g. personal collections, Natural History museums, aquariums, zoos, circuses, scientific notebooks, anatomy halls, libraries and scriptoriums); 2) to examine the curiosities that were/are collected (e.g. artifacts, fossils, internal organs, organisms both rare and common, maps, cultural objects, literary texts, art); and 3) to evaluate and reflect upon the manner, instruments, and results of such collecting (e.g. use of the microscope, surgical instruments, optics, and galvanism, as well as the creation of museum guide books, specified taxonomies, and rubrics of Science and Religion).

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Creativity is often cited as a privileged defining trait of human beings. This seminar seeks to explore the relationship between creativity and the human as expressed through literature and the arts. Encouraging a wide variety of interpretations and approaches, possible papers might focus on the creation of Humankind, human creativity and creations, and the role of creativity itself in creating the human. The seminar, while exploring the edges of creativity’s possible defining presence in the human, might raise questions such as: Is creativity specific to the human? Does creativity bridge the human to the divine? Can creativity exist in the absence of the human? Can the human exist in the absence of creativity? Is the human at risk in creativity? If creativity has an opposite, what would be its implications for the human?

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In most cultures the figure of the ghost stands for a forceful separation of past and present. Some cultures integrate the ghost figure into the present in order to provide a sense of continuity. In literature and film the ghost motif has been directly associated with particular cultural meanings, but has also been used as a plot element free of the confines of realism. The meaning of the ghost is deferred (Derrida). This quality of the ghost, neither dead nor alive, neither present nor absent, provided a forum for addressing feminist issues. Some of the first ghost stories were written by women. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s classic “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) was only the best-known of an enormous body of fiction of its type. Many examples address ethnic/race issues. In Sarah Orne Jewett’s the “Foreigner” (1900) the supernatural element is connected to the “foreign” identity of the protagonist. This seminar examines and assesses the various versions of the ghost motif in literature as an opportunity to articulate identity questions, cultural fears, and minority issues. We will focus on ghostly ambitions written by women writers. The figure of the ghost crosses boundaries of language, nationality, culture, class, race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality. At the same time it is the Other within who speaks for all of them. How has this oppositional quality been used and by whom?

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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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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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“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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In Histoire de la Folie, Michel Foucault writes: “As death is the limit of human life in the realm of time, madness is its limit in the realm of animality.” This seminar will examine how writers, across disciplines and genres, utilize states of madness to interrogate such limits on the human. In questioning the meaning of madness, writers such as Kant, Rhys, Melville, Naipaul, Feldman, and Fanon also question the meaning of the human. While acknowledging the connection between madness and writer, the seminar focuses more specifically on the connection between madness and writing in various time periods and genres.

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By defining the soul in terms of self-motion, Aristotle has established movement as a human affair. Yet already in Aristotle, “movement” refers both to a physical phenomenon and to an abstract notion (defined in the Physics as the actuality of the potential as such). The history of this figure runs at least since Heraclitus to reach our times with an unnoticed wealth of ambiguous usage. Think of expressions like the “stream of consciousness,” the “movement of thought,” or the “movement of meaning”; think of the notion of meaning as the effect of an incessant movement of signifiers, the movement of deferral and difference, the movements of desire; think of “lines of flight,” the “image-movement,” “speed” and “acceleration.” Movement is upon us, but what is it that we are saying when we apply the term “movement” (or its related figures) to the study of meaning in literature and the other arts? What critical force does this term carry? What makes it helpful, if it is, for textual analysis? What are its philosophical ramifications? What has the new art form of the moving-image contributed to the efficacy of this term or to our theoretical understanding of a notion of motion? This seminar presents studies of movement in literature, film, philosophy, rhetoric, and the arts. It also offers an investigation of the notion of movement even as it is applied in critical analysis.

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Neurologists from the nineteenth century to the present have actively engaged in debates about what it means to be human. For instance, late-Victorian laboratory experiments on the brains of frogs, dogs, pigeons and monkeys suggested that animal and human brains are uncomfortably similar. These findings caused scientists and laymen alike to ponder whether humans are soulless automata. This seminar will explore how literary authors after 1800 have intervened in debates regarding brain function. In so doing, we aim to fill a prominent gap in current scholarship. Although there has been much excellent work on the relationship between literature and science in recent years, there has been very little discussion of the traffic between neurology and literature. Rather than suggesting that neurology influenced literature or vice versa, this seminar will emphasize the complex dialogue between these two disciplines. To that end, we will consider papers examining literature from a neurological perspective, as well as papers performing literary explications of neurological texts.

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In the post-Freudian West, dreams are most often understood as expressions of our unconscious, or subconscious, selves. But prior to and outside of the psychoanalytic tradition, dreams have often been seen as privileged locations for connection between humans and their others. Religious and mythological traditions from around the world emphasize the potential of dreams to lead the dreamer outside of herself, to provide access to super-human, extra-human, or other-than-human realms. Many cultures have thus produced literature in which dreams are shown to provide connection with the divine; to be a source of hidden truths; to allow the human soul to travel outside of the body; to transcend the human constraints of geography and time. How have world literatures figured dreams as a point of contact between humans and others? How do dreams figure the relationship between the dreamer and things outside of herself? What can humans do in dreams that they cannot otherwise do? How does the otherness of dreams serve to define the humanness of the waking self? What literary purposes do dreams serve, if not to elucidate the mind of the dreamer? Papers in this seminar will discuss literary accounts of dreaming which are outside of or challenging to the psychoanalytic tradition. We will discuss literature from a range of time periods, from Late Antiquity to the present.

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This seminar proposes to investigate in historical and theoretical terms the multilingual contexts in which Yiddish literature has appeared. The vernacular language of Ashkenazic Jews, Yiddish has a thousand-year history of functioning at territorial, linguistic, and cultural crossroads. A fusion language consisting of Romance, German, Slavic, and Semitic components, Yiddish throughout the modern era has excited considerable anxiety among its linguistic neighbors: it has been vilified as a thieves’ language; a degraded form of German; a linguistic symbol of irrationality and disorder; a mark of provincialism, parochialism, or Ashkenazic chauvinism; a language of the anti-Zionist left as well as the anti-modern right. In spite of these pejorative and stereotypical labels—which have been applied to Yiddish as much by Jews themselves as by antagonistic non-Jews—the Yiddish language has functioned as Ashkenazic Jewry’s primary language of mediation and cultural negotiation for nearly a millennium, and Yiddish culture for the past 150 years has produced a roving, experimental, subversive literature fully engaged with the leading modernist trends active in Europe, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Israel. This seminar will therefore attempt to understand Yiddish literature as an inherently multi-lingual, liminal cultural production that can only be understood fully with reference to its dialogical relationship with contemporaneous and co-territorial literary cultures. As such, it intends to demonstrate the relevance of Yiddish, as well as other local, “minor” languages, to a theoretical understanding of the politics of literary form, the self-perception of the Other, and the problematic assumptions of the Human in the age of post-Enlightenment modernity.

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What or who gets lost when we translate poetry of national, ethnic, or cultural others or poetry that is other? What or who gets found? In the end, is translating poetry always intransitive? Is it always other, which is to say something else than the writer’s, reader’s, and translator’s intents or interpretations? This panel seeks to explore questions of translating poetry: on the one hand the phrase describes poetry which translates its own otherness while at the same time translating experiences of l’étranger (e.g. cultural) from other to another, or from opposition to apposition as Édouard Glissant would say. On the other hand, the phrase describes the event of translating poetry as a poetry in its own right. We welcome papers which address translating the poetry of “the Other,” whether cultural, linguistic, or another historic era; comparative translations of a poem; poems about bodily or spiritual translation; poems that translate prose or vice versa, and other relevant topics. Original translations are encouraged for those papers that address works not written in English.

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According to one etymology, the English word “man” shares a root with the Latin word for hand (manus.) Handiness is not first of all a definition of the human. Rather it functions as a gesture; the hand points to the human. Yet the hand that allows the human to be pointed out by pointing toward the ability to gesture also points away from the human (and from hands). Not only do apes’ gestures ape the human, but human gesture, when it imitates the non-signifying movements of nature, poses so grave a threat to human reason that Plato has to exclude the mimetic dancer, along with the poet, from the polis. This suggests what is at stake when theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Max Kommerell, Theodore Adorno, and recently Giorgio Agamben, turn to gesture as a mode of literary criticism, or even as the emblem of criticism itself. This seminar will address the question of gesture. Is gesture a sign of the human, or does it ask the human finally to sign off? Is the living being that gestures distinct from the zōon logon exon, the living being with language? And finally, what promise does gesture hold as a figure for literary criticism, or even for thought itself?

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Psychoanalysis has thoroughly transformed the traditional concept of the human. The psychoanalytic findings, such as the discovery of the unconscious, the intersubjective figuration of the self, the subject’s embeddedness in language, to name a few, continue to challenge any narrow or forcefully unifying vision of the self, transforming the social apprehension of the human as much as its aesthetic figuration. The presentations at this seminar fuse all these concerns to propose a perpetual agency of psychoanalysis in conceptualization of what it means to be a human.

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Animal Symbolicum — Homo Sapiens — Barbarian — Human — Woman — Overman — Counter-Human — Fellow-Human — Inhuman — Subhuman — Being-There — Being-With — Human Rights — Bare Life — Singularity — Immanent — Silence —

“The ‘I’ is a placeholder for the human voice.” This list, which could be expanded, testifies to the struggle we face as we try to assert ourselves in and through language. We find words for ourselves or for others. And we act on those words. Therefore, we also again and again need to free ourselves from those words, rebel against and reject them, extricate themselves from the languages to which they belong. Through language we negotiate our differences, assert what is important to us. We express and mask our respects and contempts, and we claim and reclaim our dignity. The “human” is a value in the sense of Nietzsche’s Genealogie der Moral — a value subject to constant and multiple re-valuations, as difficult to surrender, as it is to assert. Any use of that term today requires a rigorous examination and awareness of the field of struggles surrounding the place of the “human” in language. We seek submissions, which explore instances of this struggle of the “human” as a value, and the search for alternatives. How have writers, philosophers, artists or human rights advocates grappled with this problem? We look for a variety of perspectives and media in the arenas of discourse, culture, postcolonialism, race, gender, and nationality.

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There has long been a common perception of realism as a disciplinary narrative mode, one which must exclude or assimilate extremes, to paraphrase George Levine. The papers in this panel examine the workings of exclusion or assimilation and the processes of “othering” in works of literary and cinematic realism. They consider the various others of realist texts and the importance of imperialism and globalization, narrative articulations of space, epistemological clashes, and political realities to the excluded or assimilated others that realism represents.

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Few literary critics have so emphasized the at once constitutive and constituting role of culture in the formation of the human as Raymond Williams. Indeed, the concept that is perhaps most synonymous with Williams, “structures of feeling,” is an attempt to deal with precisely the centrality of human perception and action in reproducing social relations. Yet despite the fact that Williams’ work on the human was a formative influence on theorists such as Edward Said and Terry Eagleton, and was pivotal to the establishment of Cultural Studies, this contribution has been underrecognized and underappreciated. This seminar will attempt to redress this silence and explore the possibilities that Williams’ projects make realizable in our contemporary situation. Some of the themes which this panel will explore are:

• Nature, creation and the human
• The country and the city revisited
• Media and Williams
• Williams and the theory and politics of film
• Contemporary structures of feeling
• Memory, history and the human
• Williams and oppositional aesthetics
• Alternative country music
• Cultural materialism: then and now

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Medicine and healthcare are central and universal human experiences. Throughout the arts, medicine is represented in ways that are both realistic and metaphorical: from works on epidemics in classical antiquity to Renaissance images of anatomy and healing to modern narratives about illness and health to recent films that question the ethical boundaries of the profession. The complex relationship between medicine and human experience, between patients and practitioners, between medical ideals and practical realities, is explored throughout the arts in ways that provide a reader/viewer both identification and engagement but also some distance for judgment.This panel explores representations of medicine. Papers deal with single texts/authors or general topics, such as how art represents doctor patient relations, public health concerns, healthcare sites and circumstances, crisis intervention, aging, alternative treatments, and mental health issues. Representations across cultures and historical periods, and with a focus on both aesthetic and social contexts, are included.

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In the turbulent 20th century, most of East Asian countries have been radically changed or affected by a series of revolutions: nationalist revolutions for independence, “proletariat” revolutions of class struggle, and various types of cultural, social, and artistic revolutions that aim to modernize social customs, arts and languages. “Revolution” was once such a popular concept that different classes, social movements, interest groups, parties, schools, etc. all competed with each other for the title of “revolutionary.” Revolution hence becomes an open field where different discourses struggle with each other, and it finds others not only among self-conscious conservatives, but also “revolutionaries” themselves. This session aims to discuss the influence of revolution in East Asian countries — both past and present. Possible topics are: What are the different interpretations of “revolution”? What are the permutations of the concept of revolution in today’s world? To what ends is the term revolution used/misused?; How do revolutionary discourses (the democratic idea of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, etc.) travel to East Asia and among Asian countries? How do the local people receive and revise these discourses?; How do revolutionary theories interpret the nature and function of art? How does revolution affect the production, circulation and consumption of artistic works? How is revolution itself presented in art?

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Bombarded by otherness, the subjectivity springing out of the three sacred texts of the Abrahamic tradition faces influence, invasion, and inspiration from innumerable sources in the Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an. Divinity, demons, destiny, and the desert all have their way with their human targets. The inscribed combat and collaboration between these biblical humans and their biblical others continues to resonate with believers and doubters alike. The use of a variety of theoretical and imaginative strategies helps to foreground the action at this dynamic interface. Polymorphous strategies are welcome, including rhetorical criticism, literary theories, cultural studies, narratology, philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, mysticism, sociology, psychology, and performance studies.

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This seminar seeks to explore the effects of reaching the limits of Western epistemological and ontological discourses. The effects we have in mind encompass the storytelling function at work across the Western humanities: history, literature, philosophy, linguistics, film, etc. Our theoretical aim would be to collapse the various disciplines of the Western humanities into the same, which is to say, into the spacing of Derridean differance. We seek papers that solicit and disturb the epistemological privilege that the Western Academy, through its institutional authority, grants to the various disciplines in the Humanities. Thinking also of John Nash’s Equilibrium, our intention is that if no disciplines insist on epistemological privilege, a more open and intense dialogue can take place in the space of the same, which, we would insist, is a radical alterity. The notion of radical alterity we are operationalizing here outstrips the definition of the linguistic sign while at the same time giving rise to specific theoretical practices, in the Althusserian sense of this indexical expression. What kinds of positions do these theoretical practices enunciate in such disciplines as literary, cultural, and film studies? History, Philosophy, Linguistics? We look for papers that make increasingly explicit the global illocutionary force of deconstruction, the absent-present work of the erasure of the Western Humanities’ most precious concepts.

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The term “humanism” has a vexed history, yet one that will not die. Many scholars speak in “post-human” terms, rejecting any concept of humanism on the grounds that the term masks negative agendas and repressive ideas. Yet many others find that they need to hold on to some, perhaps vitiated, concept of humanism, often for political reasons. For example, Edward Said, shortly before he died, wrote a book about humanism. Will any humanism be possible in the future? From this central question a range of questions could emerge. Humanism has been associated with technological and historical progress. Will it continue to be viewed this way? Is humanism possible in the future without progress? Will future humanism(s) hold on to some of the precepts of the humanist tradition, or will it take a different turn entirely, or will it exist at all? Will future humanism(s) be anchored in a tension between religion and secular culture, or is there a way to destabilize such binaries? How do we understand a synthetic approach to diverse cultures after postcolonial critiques to approach a form of global humanism? What are the effects of diasporic phenomena on humanism? Papers are welcome from a variety of critical approaches: Philosophy, Social Theory, Literary Studies, Psychology, Interdisciplinary Studies.

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