ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

This session grows out of the current debate about what does and does not constitute the human in the 21st century. In the current context of the complexity of medical innovation and research, the ways of remaking and repairing military casualties, and the debates about what constitutes the normal or normative in terms both of human bodies and human psyches, this session proposes a broadly comparative approach. Given the obsession with the vampire around 1900 and in our current age, it tracks the limits of the definition of the human in the context of these modern debates and the earlier fascination of the super-predator, the vampire. It seeks to locate this orientalist and gothic archetype at the cross-roads of cultural anxieties, be they intra- or inter-cultural, imperial or post-colonial. The session will interrogate what is entailed ontologically as well as aesthetically and culturally by this atavistic and notorious complement to other variations on the human.

[more…]