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

Jonathan Abel, Columbia University
“Laughing Historically”
Tamara Chin, New York University
“The Problem of a Han Barbarian”
Eileen Chow, Harvard University
“Travels of a Song: Wong Kar-wai, Pedro Almodovar, and the Cinematic Cosmopolitan”
Carlos Rojas, University of Florida
“Inscriptions of Difference in Contemporary Chinese Performance Art”

Saturday, March 25

Haun Saussy, Yale University
“Mimesis and Mindreading”
Timothy Billings, Middlebury College
“Where the Meanings, Are: Internal Difference and the Edited Shakespearean Text”
Anindita Banerjee, Cornell University
“Difference in Retrospect: Translation, Transculturation, and the First ‘Western’ Travel Account of India”
Julie Townsend, University of Redlands
“The Pedagogy of Multiplicity: Does it deserve a seminar?”

Affiliated Seminar(s):

• Human Difference/La Différence Humaine: Session A