ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

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.

Friday, March 24

Moderator: Kristian Van Haesendonck (Villanova University)

Bram Ieven, Leiden University
“Introducing Exappropriation: On Displacement and Inhumanity in Politics”
Heike Härting, Université de Montréal
“Exapropriating Death, or Narrating the Spectacular African Corpse in Current Representations of the Rwandan Genocide”
Tammy Lynn Castelein, University of Amsterdam
“Posthuman Confrontations: Walter Benjamin and Ernst Jünger on the Technology and Language”

Saturday, March 25

Moderator: Bram Ieven (Leiden University)

Silvia Nagy-Zekmi, Villanova University
“Bilingualism of the Other: from Abrogation to (Ex)appropriation”
George Hoagland, University of Minnesota
“A World without Spaciousness: revolutionary subjectivity in the cramped space”
Jan Hein Hoogstad, University of Amsterdam
“Towards a new intellectual”
Kristian Van Haesendonck, Villanova University
“From Pirates to Space invaders: Decolonizing the Nation in Caribbean Science Fiction”