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.

[more…]

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.

[more…]

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?

[more…]

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.

[more…]

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.

[more…]

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.

[more…]

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.

[more…]

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.

[more…]

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.

[more…]

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.

[more…]

This seminar invites papers on the Faustian trope throughout world literature, in particular the concept of the human and its relation to knowledge, immortality, and magic. Papers may include analyses of canonical versions of the Faust story (Christopher Marlowe, Goethe, Thomas Mann) as well as non-canonical and interdisciplinary approaches.

[more…]

Confronting his creator Victor Frankenstein, the monster exclaims: “My form is a filthy type of yours, more horrid from its very resemblance.” Taking our cue from the monster, we invite proposals that explore the relationships between reproduction and monstrosity in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century print and visual culture. The areas we are interested in exploring include:

1. the relationships between technologies of reproduction and concepts of the monstrous copy or “filthy type”;
2. the ways in which technologies of reproduction transform and/or deform the human;
3. the ways in which technologies of reproduction produce “filthy types,” i.e., bad writing and/or bad characters;
4. the ways in which “filthy types”—the criminal, the pornographer, the revolutionary—employ technologies of reproduction like the printing press;
5. seditious literature and criminal biography;
6. conceptions of the reproductive body in scientific and medical discourse.

The seminar welcomes contributions from scholars doing work on print culture and literature; popular and visual culture; media theory; the history and sociology of reading; feminism and gender studies. We also welcome papers addressing broader questions regarding monstrosity in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century: How do technical and scientific innovations affect conceptualizations of monstrosity? What do conceptualizations of monstrosity tell us about changing definitions of the human/non-human during the period? What defines a monster as such? Are monsters necessarily singular or can there be a community of monsters? Can monsters reproduce themselves?

[more…]

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?

[more…]

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.

[more…]

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.

[more…]

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?

[more…]

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?

[more…]

George Eliot writes in an 1859 letter that the primary task of art is to “enlarge men’s sympathies,” enabling us to “imagine and to feel the pains and joys” of people utterly unlike ourselves. Thus, she promotes a literary ethics, one based in the individual experiences of the artist and audience over theoretical principle and abstraction. Along with the possibility for compassionate understanding, this model brings with it the very real possibility of violation–for instance, the collapse of a distinction between the self and other people and the consequent subjugation or effacement of these others. The focus on individual experience also risks obscuring political and historical concerns. How do we confront these dangers? Is there an attendant danger in not imagining? As writers and readers, how can we imagine the other ethically? Although anxieties about failures of empathy and ethics may arise with urgency when we confront moments of crisis, such as war, terror, agony, or grave loss, how is the ethical imagination also challenged by mundane and everyday otherness? Responding to critics and philosophers such as Nussbaum, Agambem, Arendt, Wittgenstein, and Bakhtin, this seminar will explore the limits of the imagination, what lies beyond the boundaries of the imaginable, and how literature limns this boundary. The impulse to imagine others appears inherently human. Can we assure ourselves that it is also humane?

[more…]

This seminar will explore the following issues:

1. the institutionalization of revolutionary individualism as a function of the novel and other narrative and political forms (17th-18th century novels, Declaration of the Rights of Man)
2. the theorization of group psychology (and authoritarianism) provided by Sigmund Freud and Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their studies of totemic religions and mass culture
3. the description of the multiplicity as a function of Michel Foucault’s and Gilles Deleuze’s account of power.

This panel will provide historical, literary and theoretical dimension to the debates on the shifting site of sovereignty and domination in debates about the ”Human.” It will insist that this understanding is vital to our work in humanities.

[more…]

Centuries of territorial conflict, shared tradition, and economic exchange between the nations of East and South Asia have produced a wide-range of hybrid cultural expressions influenced by the identity politics of both regions. The evolution of Tibetan representations of the Indian-born Buddha over the centuries, for example, displays Tibet’s ongoing attempts to integrate South Asian tradition into the hegemonic Chinese culture dominating its territory. A plethora of travel writings, for example by eighteenth-century British writers George Bogle and Samuel Turner and modern-day Indian writer Vikram Seth, illustrate the various cultural lenses, colonial, Western and postcolonial, non-Western, that have speculated on the interpolation of East and South Asian cultures.

This panel explores how the social, political, economic, and religious interactions between East and South Asia have influenced and produced a wide-range of subjectivities framed by those regions, as expressed through literary and cultural productions from the ancient through modern times. Paper topics may address themes pertaining, but not limited, to: Reading and Representing the “Subject”; Literature and Human Rights; Language and the Human; Translation and Metamorphosis; Western Readings of Orientalism and Otherness; Media and the Human; The Human and the Natural World; Philosophy, Literature, and the Human; Gender and Transformation; Religion and Globalism; Terrorism and Tradition; Monsters and Angels; and Temporal and Spatial Expressions of Identity.

[more…]

This seminar explores the concept of testimony beyond humanist interpretations of what it means to witness pain or injustice. In the humanist tradition, witnessing has often been construed ideally as the act of a self-identical subject, whose testimony would reflect an “I” that was fully present at the event(s) in question, and whose speech therefore establishes the conditions under which truth can be ascertained and a judgment can be rendered. These presuppositions belie the complex relationship between experience and representation (including memory), and also the infinite nature of justice, which cannot be reduced to a closed circuit of restitution and appropriation. The papers in this seminar explore ways in which the experience of witnessing exceeds the subject and its cultural, social and political correlates—the legal system, social constructions of identity, and the nation—and thereby allows us to rethink how we relate to human and non-human others (including the dead and disappeared), and consequently to the possibility of justice.

[more…]

Biotechnology, a technological corollary of molecular biology and the Human Genome Project, is continually redefining what it means to be human in the context of the natural world. Genetic engineering is producing animal clones, enhancing human traits and even creating new species. However, unresolved questions remain as to how these novel constructs will affect the idea of the human and its relationship with them. Papers that address insights into the “othering” mechanisms of biotechnology generated in the realm of literature are especially welcome. From Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Butler’s Dawn, the effects of technology on human subjectivity in the postmodern era are brought to light in fictional manner. The themes of these novels resonate with readers on how the human has been shaped by science. This seminar is devoted to coming up with new understandings of humanity in the face of novel biotechnologies that seem directed at dominating nature rather than evoking new paradigms in which we as humans can live more congruently with the ecosystem. In this postmodern era of technology evolving at lightening speed, it is ever more imperative that society can conceive of biotechnology through the lens of narrative fiction.

[more…]

The rise of individualism has long been acknowledged within the social and human sciences as an index of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity (however marked by fits and starts, dead-ends and reversals). But recently, at least since the linguistic turn, this conceptual framework has been called into question on the grounds of its essentialist or exclusionary figuration of the human. Accordingly, I am interested in papers that explore literature’s participation in the construction of the modern self-regulating or self-autonomous “individual.” I welcome studies devoted to any historical period, including those on contemporary literatures and the problematics of post-humanism, the death of the subject, relativism or skepticism, and from any perspective within literary studies, ranging from psychoanalysis and feminism to critical theory and beyond. I also welcome studies on any national context, including Latin American, African, and Asian literatures, that might provide a counter-narrative or contestation to the Western claim on the rise of the (modern, Western) subject, self, or individual.

[more…]

The rise of individualism has long been acknowledged within the social and human sciences as an index of the transition from pre-modernity to modernity (however marked by fits and starts, dead-ends and reversals). But recently, at least since the linguistic turn, this conceptual framework has been called into question on the grounds of its essentialist or exclusionary figuration of the human. Accordingly, I am interested in papers that explore literature’s participation in the construction of the modern self-regulating or self-autonomous “individual.” I welcome studies devoted to any historical period, including those on contemporary literatures and the problematics of post-humanism, the death of the subject, relativism or skepticism, and from any perspective within literary studies, ranging from psychoanalysis and feminism to critical theory and beyond. I also welcome studies on any national context, including Latin American, African, and Asian literatures, that might provide a counter-narrative or contestation to the Western claim on the rise of the (modern, Western) subject, self, or individual.

[more…]

The conquest and colonization of the Americas by the major powers of Europe forced human beings from three continents into permanent contact with their racial others. As Africans, Europeans, and indigenous Americas began to intermingle and intermarry throughout the Americas, colonial authorities tried to create laws to govern which races could and could not mix with one another and rubrics to categorize the children of mixed parentage. The Americas continue to exist as a space where different races both embrace and collide, perhaps more than any other place on earth. This situation begs the question: how do Americans (in the hemispheric sense) react to racial mixture? “Mestizaje, Mestiçagem, and Miscegenation: Mixing with the Other in the Americas” seeks to explore how the idea of racial mixture has been both welcomed and shunned throughout the Americas since the encounter. This seminar allows for synchronic and diachronic analyses of racial mixture within one country/region of the Americas, but it specifically hopes to discuss how the perceptions of racial mixture differ across the nations and cultures of the Americas.

[more…]

Translation, transposition, and transcultural intertextual dialogue figure significantly in the modern formation and transformation of critical discourse in and on fiction, film, and related literary forms. This panel critically examines such self-consciously displaced fictional and critical discourse, delineating its own territory in terms of an “otherness” that disrupts conventional configurations of purportedly “humanistic” canonical national literatures. Focused on twentieth-century transpositions (literal and literary), these papers explore the extension of earlier margins and representations of marginal or multicultural consciousness already essentially defining Russian, Latin American, and transnational literature. They examine metamorphoses of fictive form and critical discourse in terms of parody and stylization, translation and transformation, often embodied in grotesque, inhuman/e, animal or insect consciousness.

[more…]

This seminar will examine instances in which the monstrous impinges into the field of language-use, especially where rhetoric overlaps with poetics, eloquence, or systems of communication. Monsters are marvels and omens, impossible combinations stretching human imagination and possibility, troubles for beauty and action; how do they enter language or emerge from it? How are they “constructed” in and through literature? Are the word of mouth, the written testimony, the invention of fiction, the origins or originals of the monstrous? Do literature and monstrosity feed off of one another? We shall also consider qualities that the monstrous bring to language — bridity, contingency, inhumanity, the overabundance of humanity. Or is it the other way around?

[more…]

This seminar will explore the complexity and difficulty inherent in efforts to represent humanity during moments of social terror. Of particular interest will be essays that analyze how the politics of panic and terror associated with war, authoritarianism, fascism, empire, and globalization require the construction of an inhuman other. To what extent do torture, genocide, and other forms of military violence depend on an impoverished notion of humanity? How do these forms of violent othering relate to social practices of racial profiling, patriarchy, compulsory heterosexuality, criminalizing of communities, classism, xenophobia and other ideological structures dependent on divisive notions of social identity? And what role has cultural production played in challenging these notions? How have cultural products attempted to mediate the trauma of terror, record alternative versions of official history, and suggest alternative, egalitarian worldviews? What role does culture play in the struggle for Human Rights? And how can the scholarly methods of Comparative Cultural Studies enable interdisciplinary investigations into the relationship between politics, aesthetics, psychology, and historical crisis? This seminar will take a global view of the ways that these issues have shaped the cultural landscape of the 20th century and will especially welcome studies that are cross-cultural or transhistorical.

[more…]

This panel explores philosophical, literary, poetic, musical and cinematic discourses on the revolution of the senses, an examination of the conceptual division between the sensible and the intelligible.  Contested sites include theories of the human, literary relations and representations, and intermediality, from the eighteenth century to the present.  Papers address topics ranging from metaphysics and the senses; notions of sensibility, sensuality and sensuousness; the sensory relationship to books and literary formalism; sensory poetics; poetry, psychology and psychoanalysis; artistic translation across media; the relationship between language and image, and language and sound; and postmodern multi-sensory effects.

[more…]

This panel will examine the manner in which aesthetic form is rendered, and variously conceived, as external to patterns of normalcy. Formal experimentation proceeds from pre-established artistic, social and political criteria, and both shares with, and reacts to, dominant discourses. Subsequently, novel art forms are attacked on the particular grounds of debasing these accepted standards, of being degenerate or decadent. Papers are sought that analyze and critique techniques, styles and aesthetic forms that have been vilified as monstrous, particularly when their relationship to contemporary artistic, social and political paradigms establishes the grounds for this moral or critical opprobrium. Proposals are sought analyzing both literary and non-literary artistic media.

Seminar sponsored by the journal Studies in Philology.

[more…]

Is it possible to articulate the subject that subverts the late-capitalist brand of Orientalism? Is there a homo-social system that sustains inter/national ties between men of empires? Are the nation-states in postcolonial East Asia semi-sovereign vis-à-vis the Western sovereignty? These are some of the questions that arise when we observe the terms of political, economic and cultural relations that cohere the Pacific Rim as a region. Consequently, it becomes necessary to explicate power relations that are organized around gender and race, and overdetermine the formation of gender and national subjectivity. This panel seeks to capture the critical junctures in which geopolitical designations of nation-states along the Pacific Rim, either as the colonizer or the colonized, reciprocally inform the concept and content of gender and nation. We shall inquire how gender and nation are trans-national and trans-cultural construction, while working out theoretical paradigms based on the (post)colonial histories as represented in films, literature and culture. To inquire into trans-pacific configuration of gender, sexual, national and racial/ethnic identifications, relevant questions might be: How does the concept of hybrid figure in this relation?: What kinds of masculine and feminine subjects emerge in both the metropolis and (post)colonies?: How do (neo)imperialisms of America and East Asian territories figure in this context?: How may the Pacific Rim (dis)articulate classic boundaries of nation-states and regions?: What are the cultural expressions of national subjectivity in the Pacific Rim?

[more…]

Arguably what makes us human is verbal, certainly written language. The need for translation reveals both the universality of linguistic communication among humans, and the differences separating languages and cultures. As a crucial communication tool, translation requires the translator’s invisibility, yet literary translation is often the opposite, a transformation of the original text that allows the translator to find his/her own voice as a writer. Furthermore, the metamorphosis of the original text into another language sometimes creates a new and “better” writer–Baudelaire’s Poe being a case in point. Issues discussed in the proposed two-day panel include translating as a bridge between writing and reading (cf. Proust on the writer as translator); the family romance of translation (translation as filial labor of love, yet also the locus of appropriation, misreading and oedipal conflict); translation as illustration of the original.

[more…]