ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Since Plato and Aristotle “the human” has been understood in terms of being-in-community, a being shaped by the unifying principles and techniques of shared civic and social responsibility. These principles and techniques are often assumed to be complementary: on the one hand, an often totalizing idea of community–the myths, fantasies, and ideologies which found it, and which typically assert its cohesion and communion around such markers as nation, culture, citizenship, race, ethnicity, religion, and so on–and, on the other, the particular rituals, practices, and performances enacted to sustain and reiterate this idea–rituals of eating, dancing, singing, mourning, gaming, warring, orating, poetizing, among others. However, while these practices aim to affirm the commonality or self-sameness of a community’s members, several recent theorists (Anderson, Nancy, Agamben, Butler) have suggested that the repetitive, citational form of ritual itself introduces a tension or an otherness into the communal structure, unworking the community in the very work of its perpetuation, and opening it out to broader ethical and political contexts. Further theorists (Said, Benhabib, Pratt, Laclau and Mouffe) have highlighted the oppositional practices—political action, parody, improvisation—that human “others” have turned against communities’ claims to univocity. This seminar is interested both in analyses of specific human practices and the tensions they introduce into a particular historical idea of community, and also in considerations, within particular theories of community, of the confrontations between commonality and difference, “humans” and “others.”

Friday, March 24

Thomas Albrecht, Tulane University
“Commonality and Heterogeneity in George Eliot’s Idea of Community”
David Sherman, New York University
“Modernist Communities and Their Dead: Burial Obligations in Faulkner and Joyce”
Megan Becker-Leckrone, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
“Wilde’s Appreciations: Plagiarism, Citation, and Aesthetic Communities”
Patience Moll, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
“Community, Multiplicity and Communication in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu”

Saturday, March 25

Molly Rothenberg, Tulane University
“Antipathy and the Social Bond”
Stefan Mattessich, Santa Monica College
“Night of the World: Performativity and Invisible Man”
Kristy McMorris, New York University
“The Practice of Community in Myal and Zami”
Simona Sawhney, University of Minnesota
“Gods, Humans, Animals and the Community of Post-Colonial Citizens”

Sunday, March 26

Naomi Silver, University of Michigan
“Mon pays et Paris: Josephine Baker, Paul Colin, and Le tumulte noir”
Paul Anderson, University of Michigan
“Willow Weep for Me: A Dream-Life of Jazz”
Yung-Hsing Wu, University of Louisiana
“To Read with Oprah Is to Be Oprah”