ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

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.

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What are the limits of theater? Is alienation a necessary part of the experience of theater, and at what point does spectacle become surveillance? Is theatricality necessarily dehumanizing, or are there ways of theorizing theatricality that would allow for a reaffirmation of our humanity? And how might concepts of catharsis, performance/performativity, spectacle, parody, irony, and dramatic monologue be applied outside of the traditional discourse on the theater? The aim of this seminar will be to explore ideas of theatricality in relation to politics, gender, race, and history, and through examinations of theoretical considerations by Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Foucault, and Mulvey, among others.

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Despite recent work on theatricality, the term remains too often unexamined. What has “theatricality” been? In what historical contexts does the concept arise? Are there cognate terms? To what extent does “theatricality” relate to the theater? To what extent, on the contrary, does it describe not theater but those moments when other art forms cease to be themselves? Why does “theatricality” so often describe a slipping away from the human, a bestial mimetic practice? Why has theatricality become such an important theoretical term? Why, too, does theory continue to recognize itself as theater – and/or, why does it fail to do so? The aim of this seminar will be to investigate the theoretical and philosophical discourses surrounding theatricality and historical situations in which problems of theatricality arise.

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Space and time have been central, organizing categories in many philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic constructions of the human. What it means to be a human subject (or conversely, a subhuman one) have classically been defined along these two axes, in terms drawn from a well-known family of spatio-temporal metaphors and motifs – at one extreme, the human as constituted by limitless horizons and latitude of movement, at another, a providential, purposeful unfolding of history. This seminar invites papers that address and interrogate the centrality of either of these two tropes in representations of the human, in various kinds of texts and media, and across different historical periods and geographical contexts. Some questions that might be posed in this connection include: the privileging of a poetics of space and time, or vice versa, in different literary-philosophical discourses; the differential spatialities and temporalities of raced and gendered subjects within the normative space and time of Western ‘man’; property as colonization of space; the impact of recent transformations in regimes of space and economies of time on contemporary configurations of the human; the body as site and moment of subjection/subversion.

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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?

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In this seminar we will explore different conceptualizations of the relation between “affect” and “the body” as a translational mechanism crucial for establishing, producing and articulating the entities generally labeled as “human.” This seminar therefore aims at establishing an interdisciplinary dialogue between traditional notions used to describe this crucially “human” dialectic, belonging primarily to different strands of psychoanalytic theory, and aesthetics, with other alternative ways of conceptualizing the nature of affect emerging within contemporary post-structuralist critical thinking, cultural studies and film theory. A key objective of the seminar will be to incorporate translation theory to the theoretical constellation at stake here in our attempt to discuss the mechanics of affect between particular “bodies,” since a process of “translatio” seems to take place not only in the production of affect, but most evidently in the different attempts to provide particular interpretations/readings of different modes of affect. Finally, and within this context, we will pose key questions concerning the very category of the “human” as the exclusive realm in which “affects” might be able to operate and thus investigate the possibilities for a more or less technologically sophisticated realm where “affects” manage to translate into their post-human or inhuman form(s).

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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.

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As an outcome of the Babelic curse, translation and its conundrums have often been associated with the limitations of the human condition. As a recurrent symptom of the nostalgia for the possibility of a language that could transcend difference, the sacralization of the original (as that which should remain forever stable and thus repeatable in its sameness) has pushed translation to the margins of scholarship and built a reputation for translators that is frequently associated with the role of an unwelcome, but necessary, traitor. However, in the wake of postmodern thought, which tends to emphasize the transformational vocation of any reading or interpretation, translation is turning into a privileged site for the understanding of the ways in which we appropriate otherness and renegotiate the traffic between the domestic and the foreign. At the same time, we are beginning to evaluate the many ways in which this negotiation inevitably reshapes and redefines cultural products and identities. From this perspective, we plan to examine how the traditional relationship between the so-called original and the translation, or the source and the target languages and cultures, can be rearticulated, and what this rearticulation might teach us about the ways in which translations and translators reinvent and recombine both the domestic and the foreign. In other words, we are interested in looking into some of the consequences of an “ethics of difference” (in Lawrence Venuti’s words) for translation, and invite specialists to send proposals that address these issues either in translation projects or translation theories.

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This seminar explores how deviance, madness and otherness contour the limits of the “human.” Through their creative work, professed twisted minds have created deviant writings that show reality as a dominant fiction, as a strategic essencialism, and as a struggle between belief and knowledge. Deviant writings have appeared along history. They challenge the category of “difference” as it narrates, shapes, and redefines the “human.” They allow the most unthinkable other to emerge within the self. They redefine dominant social paradigms of the human from the inside. In doing so, they contour a redefinition of individual thought, in relation to a social knowledge of domination/submission, while exhibiting that representation is not solely a reflection of social relations of production but also a social relation itself.

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