ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

A “simple” question: In which language would universal human rights be expressed? That “non-universal” particular, the English language? By diagnosing the plight of stateless peoples and the failures of minority treaties after WWI, Hannah Arendt argued that the possibility for human rights would be inextricably linked with the sovereign power of nation-states. While the bulk of engagements with human rights have focused on the legal machinery of the modern state—the role of the decision and the exception, and the proliferation of extra-juridical territories—the function of language for materially enacting these policies has not borne the same scrutiny. Since Aristotle, sovereign powers like the nation-state have mobilized the category of the “human subject” as a being capable of language. Yet the nation-state adjudicates the limits of the human subject because people can only be recognized as human within a particular national language. A concept of universal humanity seems aporetic. This panel focuses on how language enfigures the human to provide the stable locus around which legal measures such as “rights” can be declared. For example, given the imperial and colonial legacies of the British and American empires, what hegemonic roles may “Global English” play to affect the possibilities of rights before issues of legality, “governmentality,” natural or civil rights could be claimed? What role will translation perform in articulating, defending, or foreclosing the possibility of rights? How will language mediate the emergence of extra-legal zones where some forms of life are thrown into camps? What is ‘lost’ in translation?

Friday, March 24

Jennifer Gully, UCLA
“Translation and the Nation-State”
Patrick O’Connor, NUI—Galway
“The Other of Deconstruction: Giving Communities?”
Shireen Patell, New York University
“The Persecuted Subject: Emmanuel Levinas, Harriet Jacobs, and the Politics of Human Rights”
Lily Saint, City University of New York, The Graduate Center
“Confronting Animals: Agamben, Coetzee, and the Emergent Posthuman”

Saturday, March 25

Bishupal Limbu, Northwestern University
“The Language of Human Rights”
Anna Botta, Smith College
“Euroland v. Fortress Europe: Human Rights and European
Citizenship”
J. Paul Narkunas, Pratt Institute
“Policing the Human: ‘Rights-speak,’ Life, and the Camp”