ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Generally, this panel seeks to explore the relations between the human or the post-human subject and its ecologies. The panel seeks contributions from humanists and post-humanists on the ecological, ethical, political, social, and/or economic consequences of such conceptions as “the human,” “nature,” and their variants. One of the goals of the panel will be to debate the extent to which such conceptions themselves already form an or multiple ecology/ies; that is to say, the extent to which they already demarcate and/or engender territories of “real” ecological consequence. Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to the following:

• How do race, gender, and sexuality shape the ecologies of the (post)human?
• Where do (post)human ecologies end?
• How are ecologies shaped by representations?
• How are representations shaped by ecologies?
• What kinds of ecologies are there? Are there sound ecologies, cinematic ecologies, etc.?
• Where is the ecology of the (post)human to be situated?
• What are the ecologies of empire?
• Are ecologies real? What ecologies?
• Are there significant differences between human and post-human ecologies?
• What do ecologies exclude as part of their self-formation?

Friday, March 24

R. Victoria Arana, Howard University
“Our Fundamental Non-Humanity: The Eerie Poetics of Hagiwara Sakutarō”
William Castro, Northwestern University
“Reframing the Sertão and/at the Ends of Globalization”
Justin Halverson, The Pennsylvania State University
“Desert Imaginary: Violence, Nature, and the Human in Leslie Marmon Silko and Cormac McCarthy”

Saturday, March 25

Li-Chun Hsiao, National Chiao Tung University of Taiwan
“Barely Life: Representing Community and its Other in the Non-human Body”
Sean Knierim, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“The Natural World’s Exigency: Ribeiro’s O sorriso do lagarto, Hinkelammert’s El nihilisimo al desnudo & International Development Policies”
Timothy Morton, University of California at Davis
“Ecology without Nature”
Christine Battista, Binghamton University
“Towards a New Postcolonial-Ecocritical archive: The Earth and the Human Subject in Kingsolver and Irigaray”