ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

The idea of comparison necessarily involves concepts of similarity and difference. Over the past 30 years, the notion of “difference” has gained considerable critical attention, from its important place within deconstruction to the more recent development of fields premised on the idea of human “difference” such as Women’s Studies, Ethnic Studies, and “minority” literature. This panel welcomes historical, theoretical, philosophical and other interrogations of the category of “difference” as it relates to the “human.” How does “difference” operate within the practice of “comparison,” especially with regard to the constitution of categories that are foundational to the field, categories such as “language,” “culture,” and even the vague notion of “sensibility”? How do various categories of “difference” such as gender, race, class, ethnicity, etc. operate within and help to constitute the notion of the “human”? Comparative analyses of regimes of “difference” across national, temporal and geographical lines welcome.

Friday, March 24

Rebecca Walkowitz, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Comparison Literature”
Pericles Lewis, Yale University
“Religious Difference in Modernity”
Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin, Madison
“Comparativity: Cultural Collage and Indigenization”
Christopher Bush, Princeton University
“The Tycoon’s Capital: Ethnicity and American Things”

Saturday, March 25

Colleen Lye, University of California, Berkeley
“What is Chinese American Realism?”
Eric Hayot, University of Arizona
“Anesthetic Modernism”
Steven Yao, Hamilton College
“Nerveless Heathens”
Jeannie IM, Columbia University
“A Chance for Resistance”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Human Difference/La Différence Humaine: Session B