ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Is the “primitive” human, pre-human, inhuman, superhuman? For whom and in what circumstances? The notions that the alleged “civilized” world has produced about its cultural “other” in different periods and contexts can be said to oscillate between the image of a disturbing savage —an irrational, beastly creature who can only in some cases attain an acceptable level of humanity through exposure to “progress”— and that of an innocent, non-speculative, hence nobler and more powerful model able to offset the discontents of a secularized and alienated modernity that has subordinated its humaneness to material advancement. The purpose of this seminar is to engage with various definitions and uses of the “primitive” in both Western and non-Western contexts. We will explore the relationships (tension? coexistence? partial overlapping?) between apparently contrasting visions that the West has generated about other cultures (chronologically or spatially distant from Western modernity). But we will also compare Western perspectives on “civilization” and the “primitive” to the discourses produced by non-Western cultures on those issues. How and why did the construction of the civilized-vs-primitive dichotomy become production of values? Is it possible to conceive a critique of civilization and of its notion of humanity from a primitivist perspective? What role does the aesthetic play in the consolidation or the problematization of such categories as “civilized”, “primitive”, “savage”? The seminar welcomes papers addressing those and other related questions through texts from various disciplines (literature, critical theory, cultural studies, anthropology, visual arts, film studies, etc.).

Friday, March 24

Patricia Sutcliffe, Montclair State University
“The Paradox of Purity and the Primitive in Romantic Language Theory”
Nicoletta Pireddu, Georgetown University
“Collections and re-collections of the primitive: fin-de-siècle ‘contact zones’”
Haiqing Sun, Texas Southern University
“The Relativity of Civilization in Borges’s Vision”

Saturday, March 25

Majid Amini, Virginia State University
“On Primitive Mentality”
Tsitsi Jaji, Cornell University
“The Jungle Sound: Undoing Primitivism in African and Diaspora Performance”
Christopher McGrath, Michigan State University
“Modernity and Its Discontents: Savage Desire and the Search for Authenticity in W.B. Seabrook’s The Magic Island”
Christopher Winks, Queens College, CUNY
“Hep Cat in the Hot Hole: Ezra Pound and Blackness”

Sunday, March 26

Robert Kawashima, New York University
“’Jacob Have I Loved You, but Esau Have I Hated’:, Patriarchs and Primitives in Genesis 12-50”
Michael Kunichika, UC Berkeley
“On Ethnographic Montage: Mickhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia”
Ikuho Amano, Pennsylvania State University
“Unbearable Graveness of Being Rational: Ahistorical Flesh of the Primitive in Sakaguchi Ango’s Idiot”
Ovgu Tuzun, Beykent University, “Representing the Muslim ‘Other’: V.S. Naipaul’s portrayal of converted Muslim societies in Amongst the Believers and Beyond Belief”